Thirty Years in Australia

Winter … that word reminds me of other scenes. There is an entry in my journal against June 6th, 1887: – "Five hours' heavy snow. Five inches on the ground." And another for the same month two years later: – "Woke up to find everything white with snow. Four inches officially reported. Broke trees and bushes." Our distant ranges used to wear white caps for weeks together, and white mantles on occasion, but oh, the joy of shovelling snow in one's own garden! It rarely stayed long enough to be shovelled, but once in a way it did, and the first of the occasions cited is unforgetable, because it was the first.

All the year round we sleep with windows open; here the upper sash was pulled down level with the lower, and stayed so night and day; and that window was at the foot of the bed. In wakeful hours I could watch the stars shining through the branches of the trees, and trace the shadow-patterns of the moon when it was her night out. Accustomed to rise early, I rarely fail to note the first glimmer of the dawn, and the first shaft of sunlight was levelled straight at my eyes, as by a marksman ambushed behind the looking-glass. As the sun rose I used to lie with eyes half shut to see the dazzle of rainbow colours that then filled them – as likewise to see, involuntarily, how the room was swept and dusted. There was a beautiful rosy-blossomed tree framed by that open square – I forget its right name, the "Tree of Heaven" was that given it by the vulgar tongue (I think it belongs to Queensland) – and it was my almanac the year round. Every morning a little bud grew bigger, a frond uncurled a little more; as the days passed the foliage spread and thickened, the leaves yellowed, browned, and fluttered away. And then the rain would drive in and make a mess on the dressing-table. Or a wind blew down upon the bed, causing regrets for the eider-down imprudently discarded overnight when we were full of the warmth of the drawing-room fire. Or – wonderful and soul-stirring experience – snow.

On that morning of June 6th, 1887, I felt the peculiar snow-cold, without knowing what it was, when I got out of bed to take in my early cup of tea. I had finished it, and was enjoying a few peaceful minutes before going to the bathroom, gazing upon the bare tree-twigs and their background of leaden sky, when suddenly I perceived the picture speckled with fine white particles, and understood that it was snowing. In the twinkling of an eye I was into dressing-gown and slippers, calling up the house to look at the sight. The governess was an Englishwoman, who had not seen snow since leaving her Kentish village, and never expected to see it in Australia. I went to her room first, colliding with a maid who was rushing thither on the same errand; then to the nursery, where I found three little night-gowned figures already at the window, flattening three little noses against the glass. The children were chattering and shouting with delight. The fine white particles had become substantial flakes by this time, and were dusting the roofs and bushes to an extent that promised snowballs presently; and the two small boys were wild at the prospect of fights in the street on their way to school. Australian boys of British parentage take as naturally to snowballing as to plum-pudding; you would think, to see them at it, that it was their regular winter amusement. The bath tap flowed unheeded, until the water overflowed on to the floor; the fowls invaded the sacred precincts of a beautifully-kept kitchen, and walked about there unmolested; the cat got on the table and drank the milk. It was washing-day, but no one thought of that. The snowstorm was the one absorbing interest to everybody, except the father of the family, who likes his bed and is not in the habit of exciting himself.

When the postman came it had been snowing – good solid snow – for more than an hour, and as he tramped up the twelve white steps to the front door his feet sank an inch and a half into the soft carpet that covered them. Shrubs and trees, creepers and bushes were thick with snow. Masses of the delicate foliage of the marguerite daisy and some young pepper trees sent us into raptures with their beauty, for there was no wind to shake them. So did some old fences smothered in green creepers, the long sprays and trails of which were as neatly covered as with hoar-frost. Each arching blade of pampas-grass bore heaped-up ridges of snow, and the feathery heads looked as if they had been dipped into cake-icing, as if nothing that was not sticky could have adhered so thickly to such unsubstantial things. Every laurel leaf held a sausage-roll of snow. The corrugated iron roofs were dazzlingly white and smooth – two or three inches of snow in every groove. The back-yard and orchard were a white plain, the latter diversified with weeds and suckers that never looked so beautiful before, the naked fruit-trees being loaded with the white powder on every branch and twig. Beyond the outer fence on one side there was a mass of furze bushes, covering a piece of waste land; all this was white, too, stretching away to the grey sky.

It was amusing to see the consternation of the fowls when they were let out. They had never seen snow before, and did not know what to make of it. They tried to walk through it, and they tried to eat it; they flew from point to point and back again, craning their necks from side to side, in search of the earth that had disappeared. They took refuge in the kitchen under dressers and tables, and, when driven thence, under the fowl-house walls, where they stood all day, each on a single leg, with feathers puffed up, the picture of patient misery. The cat had left her kittens in an outhouse before the snow began, and afterwards proposed to return to them. She daintily sounded the snow with her fore-paw, mewed piteously, and in the end went back to the kitchen and left the kittens to their fate. But she was, for a dumb animal, a singularly bad mother. The first time she had kittens she overlaid and suffocated them, and the second batch she carried from a warm bed in the middle of the night, and in a tempest of rain, while they were yet blind and helpless, and deposited them beside an overflowing water-tank, so that when they were found they were so drowned and chilled that it took a whole day's nursing to bring them round.

This was the state of things at half-past eight. It snowed, without stopping for a minute, until twelve, when the drift was six inches in some places, and in others a foot. All the heads of pampas-grass were broken off, borne down with the weight; and stout myrtle and box bushes, which had taken the snow solidly, were trailing to the ground with their stems splitting. We had one tree-fern that rose from the centre of a rockery, and spread itself over it like a handsome umbrella. It stood in front of the dining-room windows, and was an object of constant interest to the family, which always knew when it started a new frond and how it was getting on generally. At twelve o'clock ferntree and rockery were one smooth white mound – the snow covered the whole thing completely; not so much as a green tip the size of a pin's head stuck out anywhere. Even the native gums had managed to catch and accumulate the soft flakes, so that they looked as if full of white blossoms; wattles were bent and loaded like the pepper-trees, while the great pines would not have disgraced a Canadian winter forest. Such a sight had not been seen in that town since it was planted in the mountains in the old gold days. We neglected all our work to gaze upon it. And then a little wind began to blow through the white stillness, and there were signs that the snow was going to turn to rain. Huge masses fell from roof eaves and boughs, falling with a soft but heavy thud upon the garden beds and paths, which had been so smooth and spotless. "Pure as untrodden snow" – that is a good phrase. How dazzlingly pure it is! I know it is silly to say these things to an English reader, but let him be an exile for seventeen years, as I had been, and see how a snow-storm will strike him then. It brought to my home-sick heart memories of the old days of youth, before one realised that there was such a place as Australia in the world; visions of flat fen marshes, all black, white, and grey, like a photograph – of frozen meres fringed with pollard willows, and dry reed-beds rattling in the wind – of old snowballings, old skatings, old walks with old sweethearts on the ringing roads, old talks by the winter firesides … things unspeakable.

By half-past twelve the rain had come, the snow was going. It was already slushy about the doors, semi-transparent under eaves and branches. More and bigger lumps of it slid and fell, revealing the broken limbs of the trees that had seemed so strong, but were not strong enough for the weight they had had to bear. The boys had come home with rosy faces and exulting mien, their collars limp as rags, their boots and stockings saturated, their coats plastered with melting snow. They had had as good a snowballing as England could have given them – one they will not forget as long as they live.

But the common winter day up there was, in fine weather, a thing beyond words. The nipping and eager temperature, the iced pools and frosted grass in the shadows, the dazzling sun in the open, the diamond glitter and transparency of the air through which one viewed the sapphire-blue ranges miles away, the ringing granite roads, that knew neither mud nor dust, the exhilaration, the invigoration, the pure joy of life…

And I left this sweet place hard-heartedly, without a pang. So did G. His dignity of Rural Dean was laid aside with no more regret than I felt for the old frocks that I gave away because they were not worth packing. We were Bush folks no more. He was going to be "town clergy," and no unimportant member of that much-envied band; and I was going to live with books and other stirring things – the "larger life," which somehow never proves quite deserving of its name. And we were going nearer to England than we had yet been. The day after I knew "all satisfactorily settled," I began sorting, clearing up, dismantling – a job I love only a few degrees less than the rebuilding of a new home out of chaos. "The nuisance of moving!" is a lamentation one hears often from those who have to do it; nobody ever heard it from me. It puzzles me how any housewife, interested in having her things nice, can fail to enjoy such an opportunity for putting new ideas in practice. I have thoroughly enjoyed it eight times, and should like nothing better than to move again to-morrow, provided it were to the right place – the place that I am so long getting to that I almost despair of seeing it again.

We were moving now too far to take all the furniture with us; in bulk it was not valuable enough to be worth the heavy railway charges. So I packed the special treasures and all else that I could, and, leaving G. to struggle with the sale and the final farewells, preceded him to Melbourne, that I might lay the foundations of the new home before he came to it.

CHAPTER XIX

THE EIGHTH HOME

The eighth home was quite an imposing house – for us – too much so for my taste and the resources of the moment, insomuch that I had to leave the furnishing of the drawing-room to a future day; but what an interesting time I had, with my paper-hangers and people! In a few days I had the walls – raw plaster and grubby at that – decorated and dry, and the floor-staining done, and the elementary necessaries of family life collected; so that when I, and the little daughter who had been with me, met our male belongings at Spencer Street Station on the 30th of October, we went home together for good and all. G. took over his parish on the 1st of November, and we were then settled down, although the delights of "fixing up" went on for weeks – I may say for years – if it has not continued even to this day. A week or two after the induction ceremonies the parish made a splendid evening party for us in the largest public room of the town. A great horse-shoe of flowers with "WELCOME" on it – the iron frame is still preserved in the gas cupboard – was presented with charming compliments: members of Parliament and mayors and other distinguished persons flattered us in cordial speeches from the platform; professional singers – Ada Crossley amongst them – rendered a choice programme. It was a proud occasion, a happy beginning of the new life – the first rush of the champagne out of the freshly-opened bottle – sweet to remember, but sad also, because, like all such sanguine moments, it both gave and asked too much.

And now here I was living by the sea at last – the desire of my heart from childhood. There is a family tradition that when, as a mere infant on its mother's lap, I saw the sea for the first time – at Hunstanton it was – I was so overcome with sentimental emotion that I burst into tears. I can quite believe it. I do not remember ever to have seen it, after absence, without feeling more or less that way, whether I expressed the feeling or not. "Hunst'on" in those times was only the old village of the L'Estranges; where the watering-place proper was afterwards established there stood but a lonely inn on the cliff – the New Inn, it was called, though it looked far from new – where brides and bridegrooms went to get out of the world. We used to have lodgings at the Coastguards' (parents and children, nurse and governess, distributed amongst them at sleeping-time, with a common rendezvous for meals), or at "Willoughby's," within a cobbled courtyard with gates that shut at night, or at the Post Office, which sold the wooden spades and pails that were always our first purchase, or – when we could get it – a whole house of our own, bespoken for the season from the year before. The same families, more or less, occupied the limited accommodation of the place summer after summer, and it was necessary to be beforehand to secure a footing. There was one year when we were absolutely crowded out – a black year indeed! I see myself now, face downwards in the orchard grass, broken-hearted by the calamity. In those days we made the journey from Lynn on a stage coach – the last one left in England, I should imagine – and the red mass of Rising Castle was the memorably romantic feature of that drive, next to the first opening to view at the end of it of the ever-wonderful and mystic sea. We used to arrive late in the afternoon and first open one of the enormous hampers and feed like a pack of cormorants: then we little girls were fitted out in our sea-clothes – all made on purpose, from the cotton hoods to the raw-leather shoes – and the boys put on their fishermen's guernseys, and down we went to revel in sand and rocks and sea-water until the latest possible bed-time. Old Sam Dunn, the only waterman and one of my dearest early friends, would already have been up to our lodgings to welcome us, to take over the boys as partners for the summer in his boat and enterprises, and to bring his votive offering of cornelian stones and bits of jet and things to his "little missy." What days! What days! When my own children were small I went to no end of trouble and expense to give them the bliss that had made life so heavenly to me at their age. I took them to the seaside; I bought them wooden spades and pails; I would have got them a donkey (like Callaby's) if there had been such a thing procurable. In vain. It was like trying to teach them to understand Christmas. The sea is not in the blood of Australian children as it was in ours.

During all my inland life at home and twenty-three years in the Australian bush, however happy I may have been, there was always that one thing wanting – the near neighbourhood, the salt breath of the sea. I used, when in the Western District, to spend hours sitting amongst she-oak trees in a wind, because, with the eyes shut, one could believe that there one listened to its very voice. Twice, when ill in bed, I found the craving overmastering. "I know that, if I could get to the sea, I should get well," I cried at a time when I was unable to take myself thither and G. said he was too busy to take me. "Not for one day?" I implored. "What's the use of wearing yourself out with those two long journeys, and spending five or six pounds, for one day?" he asked. It did seem unreasonable, but I begged and bribed him to give me my wish. We left B – one afternoon, reaching Melbourne late at night; next morning took boat for Sorrento and the open Pacific; saturated ourselves with sea-essences until night again, and returned home next day. The result was so miraculous that, under the same circumstances, we repeated the experiment three months later: only then we took four days instead of one. I do now go back to the hills for strength, as I said in the last chapter, but quite as often exchange the sea for more sea.

For where I live I am still forty or fifty miles from the shore whereon the ocean rollers break. To be sure I can hear the sound of waves on our Back Beach – one may occasionally be knocked over by them in the Baths – but, looking across the water that runs sheer to the sky, I am conscious of the engirdling land that I cannot see; it is not the great deep that the great storms play with. Even upon this the house turns its back; my windows command only Hobson's Bay – just a pond with city round it – the mouth of the river piercing the ring to my left, the mouth of escape to the sea and the world on my right, round the breakwater pier and sea-wall that the convicts built. Well, I am satisfied with that. I have a moving panorama before my eyes that they never tire of dwelling on. I had amongst my wedding presents a pair of good field-glasses that lay stowed away and forgotten in drawer or cupboard until I came here; now they hang by my writing window, and the case is worn out with the daily handling they get. Every ship that comes in view passes me by, the multifarious craft going to or from the river wharves, the great liners that tie up at Port Melbourne opposite – these last the objects that fascinate me most. A kind superintendent of the P. and O. Melbourne office sent me, when I first arrived, a packet containing a separate letter of introduction to every purser of every ship of theirs visiting the port, instructing each gentleman to give me "all possible facilities" to "fully inspect" his vessel. It was my favourite recreation for a long time to rummage through these floating hotels, and pretend to myself that I was a potential traveller in them; and then I came home to watch them steam away without me, as I have watched them week by week ever since. It is a melancholy pleasure that never palls. But I have four of those letters to P. and O. pursers unexpended still.

Close about me lie piers, ships, boat-slips, collections of anchors, buoys, boilers, the old bones of dead vessels once so bravely alive – more alive, as I think, than anything else that hand of man has made; everything that meets the eye suggests the sea in some form. "The fishing village" is a newspaper term for the place, and when I was coming to live in it every other letter that I received condoled with me on my being obliged to do so. It is not a village; it is not more fishy than other towns along the shore; and I have never pitied myself for belonging to it. The fact that it is not a watering-place, with an esplanade and summer boarders, pleases me. It could easily have rivalled the "residential suburbs" across the way, which are cooled by the sea-breezes on one side only and not on three; but far be it from me to put such an idea into its head. Let it jog along in its unfashionable, unenterprising, unbusiness-like way while I am of it, and begin its hustling – as it will do sooner or later, if the powers that be allow our limbs to move again – when I am gone. It is a treat to find something that does not know how to advertise itself, nor want to know.

In this humdrum place, that is so cool and quiet, and to me so congenial, there is but one interesting walk. That is to say, but one that I consider worth giving an afternoon to. G. says he gets tired of it; I do not; and I am sure that Bob, the fox terrier, spends the week looking forward to it. The three of us ramble off together on Saturdays after lunch, weather and other circumstances permitting, and our faces turn the one way automatically.

We go "along the front" —i. e., the one-sided street that fronts Hobson's Bay – until the little marine stores and cook-shops and sailors' pubs lose themselves in a wilderness of docks and railway yards and buildings, lonely and grass-grown since the river and the port opposite took so much of our shipping from us, though there was a partial return to some of the activities of former days while the war was going on. Seldom a Saturday then that we did not find ourselves blocked by rows of trucks shunting back and forth across our short cuts, carrying hay or horses to the steamers whose clacking windlasses we heard from the neighbouring piers.

First we come to the yard within which lies the Graving Dock – once so wonderful, now so inadequate, but seldom empty and always interesting, no matter how insignificant the vessel on the chocks. Those weather-worn tramps that fight the unseen Powers at a disadvantage in everything, except courage and seamanship, are the ones I like to look at best. Sometimes we are asked on board, and a rough old salt, hero of untold brave deeds, shows us round and gives us tea, and feels himself honoured by the visit of persons not worthy to brush his shoes. These casual entertainments are my delight. Sometimes the captain's wife is cicerone and hostess. There was a whole family in one case, including a melancholy and discontented girl, who had a piano to practise on, and whose sad lot I was not too sea-crazy to understand. I sent her a bundle of old novels to vary the monotony, which was perhaps a cruel kindness.

Now and then tragedy comes upon the scene. A wreck is dragged in to be operated on. Some poor ship that has had a fire at sea, or her nose smashed or her side ripped open in a collision, or who has drifted for weeks with her propeller gone, lies naked before us with her wounds exposed; and then I stand and gaze and imagine things until G. gets cross because I cannot drag myself away. When the Ormuz had that accident in the Rip she so tightly filled the dock that her skeleton bow was almost within my touch. No more do I wonder at what ships can go through, having seen how that giant frame was put together. I went down to the bottom of the dock and held up the great hull in the palms of my hands. It was a strange sensation.

From the dock we pass by devious ways from yard to yard and pier to pier, descending and climbing, turning narrow corners, poking walking-stick or umbrella into the tufts of coarse grass and scrap-heaps of rusted iron or sea-rotted timber where Bob has his exciting hunts for the rats he smells but never catches. "No admittance except on business" is a legend with no meaning for us. If it rains, or the sun is over-hot, we retire to a dark and spacious shed where rows of gas buoys await their turn to shine beneficent in the stormy nights. Impressive creatures they are when viewed so near. Now and again we are shown torpedoes and compressed-air engines and such things, but as a rule we are not sight-seeing in a business way and do not desire company.

So we drift to the outermost pier of all – the Breakwater, half of which is stone rampart between Hobson's Bay and Port Phillip Bay, which stands to us for open sea. We sit as long as Bob's patience holds out on the bulkhead at the extreme end, and watch the ships go past us – so near sometimes that we could toss a biscuit on to a deck. They are intercolonial steamers that have started from a Melbourne wharf or are bound thither; the great liners, of which few are visible at this end of the week, take a more distant track. In the yachting season the blue water is sprinkled with white sails; we follow the manœuvres of the boats we know, and wait to see the winner come home, if she is not too long about it. Several times I have been aboard one of those racing cutters in a "sailing wind," and – I refrain from rhapsodising on the subject.

If the afternoon is still young we stroll on around the point, along that sea-wall which was built by convict labour – significant words, recalling days we do not care to think of. The wall is broken down in places, and stays so; this is the "old part" as the old times left it – some day to be repaired and used, but gently going to pieces in the meantime. All around us here we feel the spirit of those old times, so stern and sad. Close by is the spot where Commandant Price was murdered. It was before my time, but I have heard the tale of his life and death from friends and relatives, co-officials and eye-witnesses, authorities whom the author of His Natural Life never had opportunity to consult. They say – of course I can only take their word – that he was a brave and just, if undoubtedly hard, man, and that Frere in His Natural Life, supposed to be a portrait of him, is a cruel caricature. One of his official colleagues, who was also one of the kindest and most high-minded of men, solemnly assured me that what he did was "what he had to do" and represented to him his duty.