Banjo

by Paul Terry

  So died two detestable villains, who had taken just one chance too many; and the parakeets were free to fly headlong through the trees and gather food for their young in the almost certain hope of finding them alive on their return.

  The story of the crows concluded Illalong Children. The bush boyhood of young Barty was about to come to an end. He was now ten and his parents decided that he had learned all he could from the bush school at Binalong. With his cousin in tow, the young Paterson would be sent to Sydney to be educated at the city’s Grammar School. He would live at ‘Rockend’ cottage in Gladesville, the home of his grandmother, Emily Barton. In the refined atmosphere of Rockend, Barty would complete his transformation into a young gentleman.

  3

  GROWING UP

  Emily Barton, née Darvall, was well educated with an appreciation of the classics. In a childhood that saw her raised in the United Kingdom and on the Continent, she became fluent in Latin and French, and developed a lifelong love of art, music and poetry. At the end of her long and productive life, she was remembered as cultivated, kind and gentle. These were qualities that helped to make her the much-loved matriarch of a broadly scattered but loving family.

  The Darvalls were a family with excellent connections. Wealthy and cultivated, the men were prominent in business and the military, and the women were accomplished in the arts, music and languages. Their dynasty, however, was not without a whiff of scandal: Emily’s father, Major Edward Darvall, had sensationally eloped with sixteen-year-old Emily Johnson in 1805. Pursued by the runaway bride’s outraged brothers, the young lovers had later married at London’s fashionable St Martin in the Field and everyone was happy. Emily—their first daughter—was born twelve years later.

  Major Darvall had served in India and in 1822 he had moved his young family to Brussels. In their sixteen years on the Continent, they divided their time between their fine home in the Belgian capital and a chateau near Boulogne, France. The Darvalls had everything an upper-class European family could want, but with his wife’s health failing, the major decided to move to a warmer climate. In 1839, the family packed their many bags for a passage to the colony of New South Wales on the other side of the world.

  Major and Mrs Darvall sailed with their four youngest children on the Alfred in mid-1839, and arrived in Sydney in January the following year. During the long journey, their eldest daughter Emily Mary—a writer and poet—helped to produce a shipboard newspaper. Her contributions to the paper caught the eye of Robert Barton, a fellow passenger and an officer with the East India Company. As befitting a family of their status, the Darvalls were regulars at the captain’s table on the Alfred’s voyage to Sydney. A space was left at the table for Barton but he was suffering from lumbago and was absent from many evening meals.

  Emily Mary made a note of Barton’s illness and absence from the table in her diary on 15 October. A week later, she wrote that Barton had recovered enough to make an appearance on deck but ‘not having spoken to me I cannot give anything like a good description of him’. A few days after that, they had a chance to converse when a cry of ‘Man overboard!’ rang out across the ship. Fearing a child had fallen into the sea, the passengers rushed to the poop deck to see the rescue attempt.

  Emily was relieved when ‘Mr Barton kindly stopped me to say that it was a sailor’ who had fallen into the water. The sailor, who was very drunk, was rescued and spent the rest of that day in irons as his penance. It was a day of mixed fortunes for the drunken sailor but a good one for Emily and Robert. They began a friendship that blossomed into romance as the voyage continued. It was a relationship that led the refined and cultured Emily into a life that she surely had not imagined—as the mistress of a sprawling station in sunburnt western New South Wales.

  Barton had gone to sea as a midshipman, or a trainee officer, with the East India Company at the age of fifteen. He made three voyages to China and India and worked his way up through the ranks to become a captain. He returned to London from his final voyage for the company in October 1830. Now aged twenty-one, he was eligible to receive £2500 his father had left him in his will. He spent the next few years in Berlin and, in 1839, sailed on the Alfred with the aim of making his fortune in the Australian wool industry. Bolstered by a parting gift of £3000 from his mother, Barton bought a half share in Boree Nyrang. Soon after inspecting his new purchase, he returned to Sydney, where he renewed his romance with Emily Darvall. They were married in July 1840 and soon left for Molong where they made their home in a bark hut on the edge of their 66,000 acre (26,709 hectare) property.

  What a shock this must have been to the young bride! Although the bark hut would soon be replaced by a proper homestead with a beautiful garden, the wild country and primitive conditions at Boree Nyrang were a far cry from the genteel drawing rooms and parlours she had known in Europe. But refinement was no barrier to toughness, and Emily—assisted by servants—equalled the role played by other, less cultivated pioneering women. Boree Nyrang would be her home for the next twenty-five years.

  The first of Emily’s nine children, Emily Susannah, was born in June 1841. A little boy, Robert, was born in 1843 and Rose Isabella—the future mother of Barty—arrived in December 1844. There were more babies at regular intervals over the next few years. The children had a governess and were given an education at home. The governess was not able to teach Latin to the children, so at these times their mother took the lessons herself. As the children got older, they were encouraged to recite French and Latin verbs at the kitchen table.

  The homestead was an oasis of refinement. Visitors could be sure of a warm welcome and fine hospitality. John Hood, a gentleman from England, who toured the area in 1841 and 1842, wrote warmly of the ‘delicious sauterne and excellent porter’ he enjoyed with Robert Barton at the homestead. Hood also wrote of his pleasure at meeting local Aboriginal people and his enjoyment at witnessing a corroboree.

  The local Aborigines were peaceful, but drama came to Boree Nyrang in December 1849 when a group of young men from a neighbouring tribe in the Yass district invaded. The Boree Aborigines—mostly older men—fled to the homestead but were cornered in the garden. The men from Yass were younger and more aggressive than the defenders from the Lachlan, and some of the older Lachlan men were killed. A number of young Aboriginal women were carried off. Sensationally, the Bathurst Free Press reported:

  Shocking to relate, the savages skinned the body of one of their victims, an old man, and took a portion with them . . . The Boree [Lachlan] blacks are a remarkably quiet tribe.

  Emily’s husband Robert was away so she took refuge in the house with the children and some servants. The raiders tried to break in but were driven away by station hands with guns. The next morning, a worker discovered what appeared to a bundle of animal skins rolled up under a bush near the stables. The skins turned out to be a possum cloak. Huddled inside were an Aboriginal woman and her baby. The brave woman had literally played possum all night so that she and the little one could avoid abduction.

  The episode was one of the most alarming in the Bartons’ time at Boree Nyrang, but his grandmother’s bravery in a crisis served as a model for bush heroines in some of Paterson’s future works. The station itself is thought to have inspired one of his best poems, ‘On Kiley’s Run’. Published in The Bulletin in December 1890, it is a melancholy reflection on the end of ‘the good old station life’. In the verses, an old man remembers the bright days of his youth when he rode side by side with Kiley, the kindly station owner, on a run that lay nestled between a sleepy river and the mountain ranges in the hazy distance. The ballad tells an idyll of the bush life, a place of ‘roving breezes’ where the air was rich with perfume, swagmen were never turned away hungry and neighbours visited for days full of sport and laughter:

  We kept a racehorse now and then

  On Kiley’s Run.

  And neighb’ring stations brought their men

  To meetings where the sport was free,

  An
d dainty ladies came to see

  Their champions ride; with laugh and song

  The old house rang the whole night long

  On Kiley’s Run

  But the run was scorched by drought and crippled by losses. Kiley toiled in hope by day and dreamed of overdrafts by night. His loyal workers stuck with him until the end but eventually the bank possessed his cattle and the stockmen who had served him for so many years were sent away. The run was taken over by a man who lived in England. The new owner cared nothing for the run, except for what it could earn. He gave the property a new name—an English name—and moved an overseer into the beloved old homestead. The stockmen were replaced by sour-faced boundary riders and the cattle with sheep. The gardens died, wages were cut and swagmen and drovers were turned away. Poor Kiley died of a broken heart.

  The theme of loss on the land is a recurring one for Paterson. It reflects the experiences of his own family, partly those of his parents but more particularly, those of his grandparents. The Bartons had weathered drought, illness and falling wool prices, but the death of Robert Barton in October 1863—less than six months after Rose’s marriage—was a shattering blow that brought a traumatic end to the ‘good old station life’ at Boree Nyrang, just as drought did to Kiley’s Run.

  Robert had travelled to Sydney, partly for business but also to see a doctor about a persistent cough. On 1 October, the doctor sent Robert to his bed at the Australian Club. He was found dead in his room three days later. His death devastated Emily. Unable to accept that her husband was gone, she plunged into a melancholy so deep that many months passed before she was able to resume normal life. In the meantime, Boree Nyrang would have to be sold.

  According to newspaper notices advertising the probate of Robert’s will, Emily might have lived for a time with Andrew and Rose at Buckinbah during her convalescence. In 1866, however, she was well enough to begin a new life in Sydney. As complicated sales proceedings for Boree Nyrang dragged on, she moved to lightly settled Gladesville on the Parramatta River, west of Sydney. The home that Emily Barton—‘Mama’—made there provided a nucleus for her large family over the next forty-three years.

  Originally known as Tarban Creek, the waterside areas of Gladesville had been developed on rocky land that edged the broad expanse of the river. In the 1830s, two significant developments paved the way for the riverside settlement to eventually become a well-to-do suburb of Sydney. In 1832, a punt was opened at the end of a rough road that descended a gentle hill to end at the river’s edge. The punt created a crossing over some 200 metres of river between Bedlam Point and Abbotsford, providing easier access to the city. Soon after that, an elevated bluff on the new Punt Road was chosen as the site for an asylum to house Sydney’s growing populations of ‘lunatics’. The patients began arriving from November 1838. The ferry and asylum provided the catalyst for further development and the land around the river was soon subdivided into a residential estate, named Gladesville after John Glade, a local property owner.

  In 1852, a builder named John Crotty bought Lot 47—one of the best blocks in the estate. Facing the asylum, the elevated block overlooked the punt landing and boasted spectacular views of Looking Glass Bay. Crotty built a fine cottage of stone on his prestigious block. The house boasted seven rooms with a kitchen and attic, while a verandah along the Punt Road frontage provided shelter from sun and rain. Built in a three-sided square, the cottage had its own well driven deep into the sandstone bedrock and at the river’s edge was a fine bathing house. When Emily Barton bought the cottage, she gave it the name it carries today—‘Rockend’. Barty Paterson’s years there helped to define the rest of his life.

  *

  Barty had to briefly attend a preparatory school before he could begin his education at Sydney Grammar. These new surroundings were a far cry from the one-roomed schoolhouse at Binalong. He traded his moleskin pants and hobnailed boots for fine city clothes and, to his disgust, even ‘had to learn dancing’ in order to be polished into the young gentleman that his mother expected him to be. The transformation required little work, however, and soon Barty was ready to begin his education at ‘Grammar’.

  The journey to school each morning was markedly different to his experiences at Binalong. Rather than catching and saddling a horse on frosty mornings, the young Paterson and his cousin Jack caught a steam ferry to the King Street Wharf in the city, where they alighted for the short walk through the crowded city centre to the school in College Street.

  As an adult, Paterson was as modest about his educational achievements as he was about his writing, but in fact he was a good student who did well in the five years he spent learning alongside other young men of good breeding. One year, he shared the Junior Knox Prize—essentially a competition to be dux of the junior school—with a fellow student, George Rich, who grew up to become Justice Rich of the High Court. Years later, in The Sydney Morning Herald, Paterson said: ‘If I had paid as much attention to my lessons as to fish and rabbits, I, too, might have been a Judge of the High Court. There is a lot of luck in these things!’

  The young gentlemen at Sydney Grammar were not required to wear uniforms but were expected to wear a jacket and tie. Sober dress, however, did not necessarily preclude rough behaviour. The schoolboy Paterson—who later said his first published work was ‘an account of a glove fight’—witnessed a fight between two doctors’ sons that started one lunchtime, continued that afternoon after school and resumed the next morning. It only ended when one of the boys’ hands gave way in the third round. The ‘account of a glove fight’ has never been found but perhaps it had its genesis in that bloody schoolyard conflict between two well-bred boys. It also helped Paterson to form a view that boys should be given boxing gloves and encouraged to use them. In this way, schoolboy fisticuffs would be controlled and harm minimised. He perhaps had this thought in mind when he penned a poem, ‘Old School Days’, which was published in the school’s magazine, The Sydneian, in 1903:

  But on wet days the fray was genuine,

  When small boys pushed each other in the mud

  And fought in silence till thin streams of blood

  Their dirty faces would incarnadine.

  Rough and tumble behaviour was not unusual at Grammar. Paterson recalled the robust practice of ‘wallerooing’, in which groups of lads roamed the schoolgrounds, looking for an unsuspecting victim. With a cry of ‘Walleroo him!’ the pack would jump on the victim, force him to the ground and stuff grass into his mouth. The boy’s hat would then be squashed flat and his boots thrown away. Whatever other knowledge the victim acquired at Grammar, he soon learned to show a clean pair of heels when a ‘wallerooing’ loomed.

  But Paterson also had many positive memories of the school, and of its alumni. In more recollections penned for The Sydneian, he said Grammar offered a fair field for all, with no favours to anyone, regardless of class and creed. It was only after he left that he realised the benefits of attending the school. Wherever he went in Sydney as an adult, old classmates popped up working in government offices, tailors’ shops and law offices. Sydney Grammar, he said, was a place where ‘if a boy liked to work he “got on”, and if he didn’t, he got a certain amount of information forced into his head whether he liked it or no’.

  In the same article, he fondly remembered schoolboy pranks. A favourite pastime was to catch a large fly and tie scarlet thread to its feet, ‘creating a very fair apology for a wasp’. This delighted the boys, especially as the ‘wasp’ deeply frightened one of the teachers. A former student, whom Paterson declined to name, strewed vile-smelling wattle beans over the floor, and another successfully set a Grecian wastepaper basket on the top of a door as a booby trap. But perhaps the best-remembered former classmate was a lad who became a hero by fleeing a caning to ‘live a bandit life in boilers and empty cases on the wharves for several days’. That boy later became a solicitor.

  Sydney was undergoing a growth spurt during Paterson’s time at Grammar. In recent years, it h
ad lagged behind Melbourne, where the gold rush had caused a population explosion twenty years earlier, but now the harbour city was catching up. Like a teenager outgrowing her clothing, Sydney was bursting free of her inner-city confines. Houses, factories and hotels spread as new suburbs sprang up and soon the suburban population outnumbered that of the old city. The former convict town was growing up.

  The streets clattered with the sounds of horse-drawn omnibuses that would soon be replaced with noisy, hissing steam trams. On the water, whistles blew and ferries and steamers jostled for right of way and, at night, gas lamps lit the streets where larrikins and hustlers gathered on corners, eyeing off finer folk promenading until late in the evenings. The young Paterson sometimes caught the ferry into the city on Saturday nights, where these sights and sounds exploded around him. Although this experience must have enthralled the wide-eyed country boy, the hustle and bustle of the city had little influence on his later writings and it was always the bush that truly inspired him.

  There were plenty of opportunities to reconnect with nature. Holidays were spent at Illalong, and at other times he camped with friends in the high country of the upper Murrumbidgee. But it was in Sydney that his lifelong affection for agricultural shows started. His uncle Frank Barton, who shared their home at Gladesville, took the boy to several Royal Agricultural Society shows at Prince Alfred Park where the best of the bush came to town. The show was a place where the smells and sounds of the farmyard competed with the calls of carnival barkers; where freaks and fighters caused jaws to drop in sideshow alley and well-dressed city toffs rubbed shoulders with country yokels.

  In April 1875—the first year of Barty’s schooling at Sydney Grammar—Rose Paterson, who was pregnant with her fifth child, came to stay at Rockend. In a letter she wrote to Nora one Sunday evening in April, Rose revealed that she was in Sydney to find a governess to begin the education of her oldest daughters Flo, now aged nine, and Jessie, seven. Rose had the perfect employee in mind—a ‘perfect gem of a governess, cheap, cheerful, [and] clever at housekeeping’. The governess would need one other quality—she should be elderly enough ‘not to set the Browns whispering in their usual fashion’.