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CONTENTS
Part 1 — The Sydney Morning Herald - Saturday 4 Feb 1939
In the Days of the Gold Escorts
Teamster’s Nightmare
The Sport of Kings
A Slight Dispute
Part 2— The Sydney Morning Herald - Saturday 11 Feb 1939
Giants of the Paddle, Pen, and Pencil
Legal Luminary
Poet by Circumstance
Premature Death
Part 3— The Sydney Morning Herald - Saturday 18 Feb 1939
A “Reliability” Drive to Melbourne
Rural Reactions
Coming of the Trout
Hill Billies
Retreat from Moscow
Part 4— The Sydney Morning Herald - Saturday 25 Feb 1939
An Execution and a Royal Pardon
Handsome Adventurer
Execution of Morant
Part 5— The Sydney Morning Herald - Saturday 4 Mar 1939
Political Giants and “Pilgrim Fathers”
Solidity Preferred
Reading and Writing
The Argonauts
An ancestor whose talents I, unfortunately, failed to inherit was William Paterson, who founded the Bank of England, He is described in the Encyclopaedia as a “Scotch adventurer,” and “adventurer” is right, for, not satisfied with starting the Bank of England on its primrose path, he aspired to follow the example of Clive and Hastings and found a sort of Scottish East India Company at Darien, on the Isthmus of Panama. Had his Bank of England luck stuck to him he might have been another Cecil Rhodes, for the Scotchmen poured their money into the venture, but the malaria and the mosquitoes beat him, and he returned to Scotland to face his countrymen who had lost their money. Instead of upbraiding him they subscribed £10,000 to put him on his feet again! Of my father I saw little, for he was mostly away pioneering in Queensland. There he had a skirmish with blacks, during which his cousin, James Paterson, had his spectacles knocked off his nose by the tip of a boomerang: he tried to take sheep out to some new place, but was caught on flooded country between two rivers, and had to shear them on a sandhill; and finally he had to get out of Queensland — just another of the many pioneers who unsuccessfully threw dice with fate. I never knew the name of his place in Queensland, but I understand it adjoined Lammermuir, the station described in “Christison of Lammermuir,” probably the second best tale ever told of bush life; Jeannie Gunn’s “We of the Never Never” being the best.
However, to meet losses in Queensland, Buckenbah had to go, and we moved to Illalong, a station in the southern part of New South Wales. Here we were on a main road between Sydney and Melbourne, with the Lambing Flat diggings, now called Young, only a day’s ride away. It was an unlucky place — enough to break anyone’s heart — for the Free Selection Act had just been passed, and the selectors, droves of them, all seemed to pick on us, as there were creeks everywhere which solved for them the water problem.
Bogolong (now called Bookham) was a township on the main southern road, and consisted of two “pubs,” half a mile apart, with nothing in between! When I asked the roustabout what had happened to the rest of the town, he said “This is all they is. One pub to ketch the coves coming from Yass and the other to ketch the coves from Jugiong.”
The track was about half a mile out of the town, unfenced, with no grandstand, and was mostly laid out through a gum and stringy-bark scrub. The racehorses were tied to saplings, as were hundreds of other horses ridden by wild men from the Murrumbidgee Mountains, who had all brought their dogs. There was a sprinkling of more civilised sportsmen from Yass and Jugiong, blackfellows and half-castes from everywhere, and a few out-and-outers who had ridden down from Lobb’s Hole, a place so steep that (as the horse-boy said) the horses wore all the hair off their tails sliding down the mountains. The days of racing in heats (i.e., running the horses three times against each other to see which was the best) had died out everywhere except in these outlandish places; but there was one heat race still on the programme. This was the Bogolong Town Plate of a mile, possibly the last heat race that was ever run anywhere.
I had ridden over on a pony with a child’s saddle, glancing at the pony to see that he was all right, I saw a Murrumbidgee mountaineer about seven feet high taking the saddle off my pony and putting it on a racehorse. Running over to him, I managed to gasp out “That’s my saddle.”
“Right-oh, son” he said “I won’t hurt it. It’s just the very thing the doctor ordered. It’s ketch weights, and this is the lightest saddle here so I took it before anybody else got it. This is Pardon,” he went on, “and after he wins this heat you come to me an I’ll stand you a bottle of ginger beer.”
Henry Lawson was a man of remarkable insight in some things and of extraordinary simplicity in others. We were both looking for the same reef, if you get what I mean; but I had done my prospecting on horseback with my meals cooked for me, while Lawson had done his prospecting on foot and had had to cook for himself. Nobody realised this better than Lawson; and one day he suggested that we should write against each other, he putting the bush from his point of view, and I putting it from mine.
“We ought to do pretty well out of it,” he said. “We ought to be able to get in three or four sets of verses each before they stop us.”
This suited me all right, for we were working on space, and the pay was very small — in fact, I remember getting exactly thirteen and sixpence for writing “Clancy of the Overflow” — so we slam-banged away at each other for weeks and weeks; not until they stopped us, but until we ran out of material. I think that Lawson put his case better than I did, but I had the better case, so that honours (or dishonours) were fairly equal. An undignified affair, but it was a case of “root hog or die.”
To show how a poet can be without honour (or profit) in his own country, I remember Lawson’s wife telling me that she was quite happy because Henry was “working” again.
“What’s he working at,” I asked, “prose or verse?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t mean writing, I mean working. He’s gone back to his trade as a house painter.”
And this was the man whose work was afterwards translated into foreign languages!
They were quite invisible from a distance, and all the experienced drivers had their passengers standing up on the back seat to yell out “gutter” when one hove in sight. The poor little Frenchman, blissfully unconscious of this, hit the first gutter at fifty miles an hour, sending his car up in the air like a hurdle horse which has hit a jump. Parts of the car were scattered all over the road and the Frenchman ran from one to another shouting: “Pourquoi les canivaux?” (why are the gutters there?) As I had some sort of Surry Hills knowledge of French I did my best to explain things, but the only result was to make him cry worse than ever.
A Melbourne stock-broker, having his first long drive, had a first class “cockatoo” standing up in the back of his car (cockatoos always set a sentinel to look out for trouble) and did so well between Goulburn and Gundagai that he insisted on shouting champagne for all the drivers and their associates. Nothing like this had happened in Gundagai since the big flood and as soon as the word got round the whole population of the town drifted into the bar and started to lap up champagne like milk. He drank with all and sundry and did himself so well that when he left Gundagai next morning the bridge was not wide enough for him and he hit the abutment fair and square with his radiator. This car, also, became a casualty; but the owner said that if a man was a sport it was up to him to BE a sport and he insisted having the car repaired at Gundagai, so that he could save his face with his friends by finishing the trial even if everybody else had weighed in and gone home when he arrived.
Sad to say the local blacksmiths were unequal to a repair job which practically meant taking the tail light and building a new car onto it. He and his cockatoo passed us somewhere about Seymour sitting on the remains of their car in a railway truck, waving bottles and shouting encouragement.
That same afternoon a bronzed, clean-shaven man of about thirty, well set up, with the quick walk of a man used to getting on young horses, clear, confident eyes, radiating health and vitality, walked into the office and introduced himself as Morant.
“I’ve been stopping with your uncle, Arthur Harton,” he said, “and when he heard I was coming to Sydney he told me to be sure and call on you. Fine man isn’t he? He knows me well. He said if anybody could show me round Sydney you could.”
This set things going, so to speak, and the talk drifted from stag-hunting on Exmoor to galloping up alongside wild cattle and ripping them with a knife, in the scrubs at the back of Dubbo, which, in those days, was quite far-out country. We had a hunt club in Sydney in those days, and he said that he must get a horse and come out with us. He talked like a man without a care in the world. I found myself comparing him with the picturesque heroes of the past who fought for their own hand. Nowadays we would call him a case for a psychologist. Yet, he was no Micawber; he did not wait for something to turn up; he tried to turn it up for himself.
Time passed on golden wings while we were chatting about the bush, and it was just on three o’clock when he hurriedly looked at his watch. “By Jove,” he said, “I’ve enjoyed myself so much talking to you that I forgot I had to cash a cheque. And now the banks will be shut. Perhaps you could cash a cheque for me for a fiver. I’ve got to pay some bills and I’ve run myself clean out of money.”
Almost unwillingly I said that I did not have it about me, and suggested that he should let his creditors wait till the banks opened in the morning. He dismissed the matter with a wave of his hand, and neither then nor at any other time did he bear any malice for the refusal.
His reputation as a daring rider, and his relationship to an admiral, made him a social lion. Asked to stay with some of our best people, he turned up riding a pony, with his luggage on the saddle in front of him. This was a great act, and went over big. He got them to take in the pony for him and borrowed some clothes from the son of the house who happened to be about his own size. Then a charity gymkhana was organised, and a buckjumper was wanted to give tone to the proceedings. Who could provide a buckjumper so well as Mr. Morant? He fairly lived on buckjumpers away back in his own wilds. He borrowed ten pounds from the gymkhana committee to pay the expenses of the buckjumper, a celebrated grey animal which he meant to bring down from Dubbo by rail. This also went over big, and people flocked to the gymkhana to see the celebrated Morant’s celebrated buckjumper.
Unfortunately the man who owned the buckjumper knew Morant quite well; and while he was unwilling to lend his animal to anybody, his unwillingness to lend it to Morant amounted to an obsession. Did this disconcert our hero? Not a bit of it. He went out to the saleyards and agreed with a dealer who bought horses by the carload to break in for him a grey horse, one of a truckload; and this horse (as it turned out) knew no more about buckjumping than it knew about the Einstein theory. The animal’s performance at the gymkhana was such a “flop” that the committee squealed like anything about their ten pounds, and said that they were going to stick to the grey horse until they got their money back. A fair enough proposition, until the owner of the so-called buckjumper turned up and offered to give the secretary of the gymkhana a lift under the ear if he did not give the animal back.
After this, our hero’s reception at his temporary home was anything but enthusiastic, but, with his queer flair for theatricalism, he managed to make an exit with a certain amount of glory. He said that he was called away suddenly to Queensland, to inspect a station, and as they had treated him so well he wished to present the son of the house with the pony which would be of no further use to him. He would take no denial, and he handed over the pony with a sort of Arab’s farewell to his steed—a touching scene which lingered in their memories till the owner of the pony cast up and took it away, saying that he had paid Morant a couple of pounds to quieten it for a little girl!
Such was the man who was shot by the British Army after a court-martial for defying Army orders and shooting a prisoner in revenge for the death of one of his best friends. I happened to know all that was to be known about Morant’s trial and execution, for the lawyer who defended him, one J. F. Thomas, of Tenterfield, asked me to publish all the papers—evidence, cablegrams, decision, appeal, etc.,—a bulky bundle which he carried about with him, grieving over the matter till it seriously affected his mind. He blamed himself, in a measure, for the death of Morant, but I could not see that he had failed to do the best he could with a very unpleasant business.
Sir Henry Parkes, with his mane of silvery hair and his Nestorian beard, adopted the role of the aloof potentate; in the argot of the prize-ring, he let the other fellow do the loading, and then countered him heavily. It is said that a field-marshal in war cannot afford to have any friends, and Parkes was a field-marshal, plus. Not but what he could relax on occasion, but always in an aloof, Jupiterish sort of way. I remember seeing him at a public dinner when the waiter poured him out a glass of champagne from a full bottle, and then moved off with it.
“Leave that bottle,” said the statesman, who always got the temperance vote. “I’ll finish that and probably another one after it.”
The old man never had any money, though goodness knows he had opportunities enough of getting it “on the side” had he been so minded. On various occasions he came into the lawyer’s office where I was employed, always full of dignity, in a frock coat and a tall hat, to discuss his pecuniary complications. But personal finance bored him. He despised money; he was Sir Henry Parkes.
Sir John Robertson was also silver-haired and Nestorian-bearded but he was by nature what the Americans call a “mixer,” prone to sit for hours in clubs or pubs entertaining his cronies; in fact, anybody could be his crony who was found linguistically worthy. He, too had a rough ride over the financial rocks.
In the gloomy days just before the banks shut I was told by one of them to write Sir John what the bank called “a nice firm letter” requesting the payment of some money. The old man came in, ran his eye over the office and asked, through his nose: “Who’s looking after the affairs of this English, Scottish, Continental, Japanese, Australian . . . Bank?”
I said that I was.
“Well, you tell them not to write me any more d—d silly letters,” and with that he went off to the club.
The bank asked what reply Sir John had made to the nice firm letter, and I said that he had given a nice firm answer.
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