by Paul Terry
Rose also imparted the news to Nora that the ne’er-do-well Blenty Paterson had finally married his sweetheart, Mary Wilson. Marriage had done little to mend Blenty’s ways, but at least his new wife had met with Rose’s approval because while Rose was in Sydney Mary was entrusted with the care of Rose’s youngest children back at Illalong. Rose’s letter also included a hopeful note. Her husband’s wealthy uncle Hamilton Howison had died in Scotland and, as luck would have it, his fortune was left intact. Rather waspishly, Rose hoped that ‘Providence [had] put a touch of natural feeling into old Hammy’s heart at the last’ and that he had remembered his Australian relatives in his will. If so, it would provide some much-needed relief to the stretched family budget back at Illalong.
The late Uncle Hamilton did indeed come through with the financial goods. In Rose’s next letter to Nora, on 14 May, she revealed that the old man had left £3000 in trust to his relatives. The Illalong Patersons could expect to receive a little over £100 a year from the bequest—quite a substantial sum given that Andrew earned £200 a year working for the Browns. When her baby was born four months later, Rose and Andrew named him Hamilton Howison in honour of Uncle Hammy. In the meantime, Rose felt the windfall might solve the problem she had with her husband’s employers:
. . . I hope a time may come when Andrew may see the advisability of either striking out for himself again or getting some more genial employment in [which] I shall feel happier than I do under the smothering influence of the low-bred, whispering, slandering suspicious snobs who have poisoned the whole atmosphere of our formerly friendly simple-minded neighbourhood . . .
Barty and Jack, of course, were barely interested in these adult troubles. Gladesville—in particular, the river—offered them an entirely new playground, vastly different to rural Illalong but equally fascinating in its scope and diversity. They had obtained a little timber boat which they rowed into the shallows to fish for flathead and bream. It mattered little that the boat, ‘mostly held together by tar’, took on an alarming amount of water—it simply meant that the catch of the day could be kept fresh as it swam in the salty ballast that sloshed around inside the wooden hull.
Rockend provided spectacular views of the river and the water teemed with sail boats carrying fruit and timber from the hinterland into Sydney Harbour. Sometimes the doldrums struck and the boats petered to a halt. Barty envied the happy-go-lucky sailors whose fortunes depended on the winds. As he remembered later in The Sydney Morning Herald, the failure of those winds did little to faze the stoic crews:
If the wind died away and they were left in the doldrums—well, they didn’t worry. They anchored and caught themselves feeds of fish which they cooked on their little galley fires, the scent of frying red bream mixing not unhappily with the aroma of guavas, grapes, and the big hautboy strawberries which now seem to have gone out of fashion . . .
The Sydney Rowing Club lay just across the water at Abbotsford, and the boys had grandstand seats for watching professional rowers as they sculled the broad waters of the river. It was a time when rowing provided as much interest to the sporting public as cricket and football. The rowers were heroes to their young fans and the boys ‘knew every man of them’. There was the legendary Ned Trickett, the quarryman who had defeated the English champion on London’s famous Thames course no less; and ‘the greatest of them all’, Henry Searle, who had learned his art as a boy by rowing his siblings 5 kilometres across the Clarence River to school every morning and home again in the afternoons. When these men, and others like them, strolled through the quiet streets of Gladesville it was as if gods had descended among the townsfolk and, although the rowers could not walk on water, their prowess in their narrow boats was the next best thing.
Emulating his broad-shouldered and brawny-armed heroes, the teenaged Paterson spent hours sculling the broad waters outside his grandmother’s windows. His damaged right arm did not impede his progress on the water, although it continued to cause problems. At around this time, Barty broke the arm again, in the same place as before. The cause is unknown but it might have happened during a school holiday at Illalong. The arm was placed in splints, which, according to Rose, ‘ruined his holiday’. But as soon as the splints were removed, Barty returned to his usual active self and was less troubled by the arm than his mother was.
Back at school, he played cricket for his school team. There are few records of his prowess at this sport, but it was not his forte. In one of his final games, he batted for the Second XI and was caught for a duck. His affection for the game was strong enough, however, to attract him to first-class matches in the city. He paid a shilling to spend many Saturday afternoons at the Sydney Cricket Ground where he could see his heroes in action. As it happened, he was there for one of the most infamous events in Australian sporting history.
In February 1879, New South Wales took on a visiting England XI at the cricket ground. As was normal practice for the time, both sides picked an umpire for the match. England, led by Lord Harris, had appointed a Victorian footballer and rising cricketer, David Coulthard. The New South Wales side chose Edmund Barton, a relative of Paterson’s who would go on to become the first prime minister of Australia. Coulthard, the Victorian, was at the centre of the trouble that was about to erupt. The stands were full of bookmakers, and punters’ money was flowing for the home side. The Sydney Morning Herald noted reprovingly that ‘the printed placards notifying that betting was prohibited were ignored’.
On the second day of the match, Saturday 8 February, the fifteen-year-old Barty Paterson was among a crowd of about 10,000 people watching New South Wales trying to chase down England’s first innings score of 267. It was a tense afternoon as the local side collapsed to be all out, ninety runs shy of England’s total. For New South Wales, only the wicketkeeper and opening batsman, Billy Murdoch, provided any hope. Murdoch was unbeaten at the end of New South Wales’ first innings and that afternoon he returned to the crease when England’s captain Lord Harris ordered the colonials to bat again.
Murdoch had put on a handful of runs in his second innings when the Victorian umpire Coulthard gave him out on a controversial run-out call. The crowd was incensed that their man had been dismissed by an umpire appointed by the English. Cries of, ‘Not out!’ and ‘Go back to the playing field, Murdoch!’ rang out across the ground. Coulthard bore the brunt of the crowd’s ire. The punters had heavily backed New South Wales to win and, what is more, Coulthard was a Victorian—an inter-colonial rival. Some in the crowd even believed he had placed a large bet on England to win.
Suddenly a wave of larrikins surged on to the ground. Coulthard was jostled and shoved in the ensuing melee and the English skipper, Lord Harris, was struck with a stick. England’s opening batsman, Albert Hornby—a keen amateur boxer—rushed to his skipper’s defence and triumphantly dragged the stick-wielder off to the pavilion. Hornby’s shirt was torn from his back as he wrestled his way through the crowd. Two other English cricketers pulled stumps from the pitch to use as weapons and escorted their captain to safety. Chaos reigned as angry spectators milled around the ground and there were fears that thousands more still on the sidelines would join the invasion. It was only after play was abandoned for the day that order returned.
It was, said the Herald, a national humiliation:
It is a good thing that we should be able to boast of our cricket but it is a good thing also that we should be in a position to boast of our manners. The latter consolation is presently denied us, and an apology is certainly due to our guests for our breach of hospitality.
Barty Paterson was among the mob that invaded the ground that day, but he later downplayed the seriousness of it. The well-brought-up Paterson was no larrikin. He might, in fact, have agreed with Lord Harris, who, in an open letter to the newspapers, later described the Australian larrikin as being like ‘the most exuberant Californian hoodlum . . . [with] the local enthusiasm of the English yokel’. But more than fifty years later, Paterson remembered the sc
andal with typical humour:
When we got to the wicket, we didn’t know what to do. Everybody was hooting and shouting and arguing and the people from the members’ stand were crowding in to help the English. Nobody really interfered with the English players—we just hooted them off the ground, and then it struck us that if we didn’t go back to our seats we wouldn’t see any more play. So back we all went and that was the end of the great Lord Harris riot which gave Australia a bad name for years.
After a long delay, England won the match by an innings and those punters who had so heavily backed New South Wales lost their money.
*
In March the following year, Barty came home to Illalong for a short holiday. He travelled by train—much faster than a coach and still a novelty—but his journey was anything but refreshing. The train was so crowded that he could only find standing room in the guard’s van. The van was stored with salt fish, which did not smell very pleasant in the early autumn warmth. He alighted at Binalong station and walked the 4 miles to the homestead. It was the morning of Good Friday and he was dismayed to discover that there was only fish for breakfast.
He had recently turned sixteen and, while not yet a man, he was no longer strictly a boy. His mother noted in a letter to Nora that he had grown a lot over the past six months and ‘is on the turn for improving his looks’. Dark-haired with an aquiline nose, he was growing into an attractive young man who, according to his mother, had ‘brought his brain into better subjection than before’.
Although he was a mature and considered young fellow, he was not immune to the waywardness of teenagers and later that year he earned Rose’s wrath for some unspecified act of rudeness. In a letter to Nora—who was holidaying at Rockend at the time—Rose asked her sister ‘to tell Barty from me that I don’t like little boys to be pert to their elders, more particularly to their mothers’. Rose enclosed two shillings and sixpence in stamps for Barty to buy a book about a good boy so that he could improve his mind. She did not specify which book Barty must read, but firmly stipulated it should not be one of Mark Twain’s. Rose was clearly offended by her son’s ungentlemanly behaviour and, in a rare criticism of her easy-going husband, Rose said that Andrew was too indulgent in ‘allowing smartness & not rebuking rudeness and sauciness’.
Saucy or not, Barty was no longer ‘a little boy’ and in fact his school days were almost over. His parents encouraged him to pursue a career in law, and it was hoped that he could win a scholarship to Sydney University or could become articled to a solicitor. Rose was optimistic. As she wrote to Nora, her son had ‘plenty of good sense & I think no desire for fast ways and fast companions. So I think we may fairly hope for a good fortune for him’. These bright thoughts were encouraging, but what Rose could not have known was that an unexpected death would soon threaten to turn her family’s life upside down.
4
A HORSE CALLED BANJO
Barty was in more trouble with his mother in October 1880. Cousin Jack had contracted typhoid fever and Rockend was placed in quarantine. Barty had been sent to stay with a neighbour, Mrs Blaxland, who strictly forbade him from going within 50 yards (45 metres) of Rockend until the quarantine order was lifted. But the cousins soon ‘got yarning’ over the back fence, in clear defiance of the order. Rose worried about what Mrs Blaxland would think of the Patersons’ code of honour and resolved to write to Barty to give him ‘a good blowing up’.
The boy was at something of a loose end. He was meant to sit exams at school that month, but the typhoid outbreak had disrupted his lessons and he had little to do while he waited for Rockend to get the all-clear. His inactivity was a source of concern to his mother but, on a brighter note, an uncle had provided £50 to pay for Barty to return to school the next year, where he would either sit the matriculation exam or try for a scholarship to university.
In the meantime, as the desultory end to Barty’s penultimate year at school petered out, it was almost time for him to return to his beloved Illalong for summer holidays. Rose was looking forward to his return because Andrew had been made returning officer for the electorate of Burrowa, which meant he was away from home even more than usual. Andrew’s health also continued to be a concern. In a letter to her mother, Rose said her husband was recovering from his annual ‘spring attack’, an unspecified illness that was as debilitating as it was mysterious.
But Barty’s holiday had barely started when an upheaval threatened the family’s future. On New Year’s Day, 1881, Henry Brown, the owner of the Bendenine estate, the conglomerate of properties that included Illalong, died suddenly from complications arising from bronchitis. Brown’s death left Andrew without an employer and, more importantly, Brown’s will threatened to leave the Paterson family without a home. The will, written twelve years earlier, stated that all of Brown’s property should be sold and divided between his wife and other parties. It left Rose—who always held an inflated opinion of her husband’s abilities—clinging to forlorn hopes that Andrew would get a permanent and well-paid job as a police magistrate. At night, her thoughts also turned to buying the increasingly dilapidated Illalong homestead and a few surrounding paddocks, and ‘keeping a few sheep & horses & heaps of poultry and living by selling eggs and fat turkeys’.
Unfortunately, there was no job offer for Andrew and even less hope of buying any of Illalong. The family’s future would depend on the sale of Brown’s properties as one big lot. A Melbourne-based stock and station agent advertised the entire estate in newspapers around the country. The property totalled more than 66,000 acres (26,709 hectares) of ‘excellent pastoral and agricultural land’. The advertisement noted that the main homestead at Bendenine was a comfortable building of ten rooms with a detached kitchen, a servants’ room, a coach-house, a vineyard, orchards and flower gardens. Almost as an afterthought, the advertisement revealed a house on the Illalong portion of the property was also for sale. This, of course, was the cottage that the Paterson family called home. The entire estate would be offered at auction on 4 November.
In February, Andrew and Barty set off for Sydney. The purpose of the trip was two-fold. Andrew was to meet with the executors of Brown’s will to discuss his future and, at the same time, seek to place Barty with a solicitor as an articled clerk. During their absence, Rose wrote to Nora expressing her fears that the cost of finding an appointment for the boy would be prohibitive:
Should the Sydney solicitors all be so stony-hearted as to charge the full premium for admittance, £250, there is a more moderate man in Goulburn, a Mr Davidson, whose premium is only £50, with whom we may place him. He is a gentleman & a rising lawyer & promises to look after his clerks himself, which is something in his favour.
But another setback occurred in April when Barty came down with a severe case of typhoid fever that left him confined to bed for more than a month. It meant that he could not take his matriculation exam on 7 June as scheduled, and in order to qualify to become an articled clerk he would either have to sit the Senior Public Exam in November or wait until the next matriculation test in June the following year.
He had tried for university entry and later said that he ‘missed it by about a mile and a half ’. In fact, he performed quite well, scoring a high pass in English and Latin. It was a good effort but not quite good enough, and his prospects seemed to have dimmed. But then there was a stroke of luck when Rose’s cousins Henry and Ned Kater visited Illalong with a view to buying the estate. Successful businessmen, the brothers decided not to buy the property but they did pull some strings and got Barty articled to a lawyer at the Sydney firm of Spain & Salwey. In July, the boy had been at home recovering from his fever and preparing to return to school. Three weeks later, thanks to the intervention of the Katers, he began his career as a lawyer and his schooldays were over.
Although the practice of law never filled him with delight, it did teach him something of the world. One of his first jobs was to help in the defence of a ship’s captain accused of failing to show a ridi
ng light on the stern of his vessel. The captain lost and was fined £5. It was a valuable lesson for Paterson, the young lawyer-in-training, who later recalled:
[It was] an unnerving experience, but it taught me that a case at law is like a battle. If you listen to the accounts of the two sides you can never believe that they are talking about the same fight.
Meanwhile, at Illalong, Rose was now largely free of worries for her oldest son but she had plenty of other things to keep her awake at night. In March or April she had fallen pregnant with her seventh child and was finding this pregnancy just as troublesome as the previous six. She was suffering from rheumatism, no doubt made worse by the draughts and chills that sneaked through the gaps at the old homestead, while Andrew had added lumbago to his other ailments. Their situation was left in limbo when the Bendenine estate was withdrawn from sale on the day of the auction, but throughout that cold and blustery spring the optimistic Andrew was confident he would remain as manager after the sale eventually proceeded. The pregnant Rose, however, had her doubts.
Portrait of A.B. Paterson. Photograph courtesy National Library of Australia.
She found consolation for this uncertainty in the joy of her children. The baby, a little girl named Gwendoline, arrived safely after a breech birth on Christmas Eve. In a letter to Nora in January, Rose described Gwendoline as a ‘queenly child’ who ‘has not cried for half an hour since she has been born’. Tempering the joy of Gwendoline’s arrival, however, was the fact that the nurse engaged to oversee the baby’s care was ‘a dejected whining woman, always talking of her own ailments’. Rose had travelled to Yass to have the baby and was staying at an inn where the Chinese cook refused to prepare any of the simple dishes that Rose requested, and so she made do with porridge. Andrew, meanwhile, was busy preparing a long report for the trustees of the Bendenine estate.