Banjo

by Paul Terry

  It was a popular victory. The ‘Breaker’ was carried shoulder high all around the ground. A collection was taken up, and a good sum realised, but when offered to Morant he smilingly remarked, ‘Give it to the hospital’.

  Meanwhile, it was a productive if rather haphazard time for Henry Lawson. He had returned to Sydney from Bourke in 1893 with hopes of finding permanent employment as a writer. It was an ambition he never achieved. Unable to get regular work, he freelanced prolifically, painted or laboured to make ends meet, and stayed with his Aunt Emma or in ‘third rate hash houses’. In December 1894, his mother Louisa had published Henry’s first book, Short Stories in Prose and Verse, and in 1895, Angus & Robertson agreed to publish his second. It was also in 1895 that he met Bertha Bredt, a trainee nurse and the daughter of a prominent feminist and social agitator. They married in 1896. It should have been a good match, but as always, Henry proved to be his own downfall.

  Lawson was a key figure in the bohemian Dusk and Dawn Club, an exclusive Sydney-based circle for writers, artists and journalists. Its motto was ‘Roost High and Crow Low’, and its rules were printed in Chinese, supposedly to prevent offence to any of the ‘Duskers’—some of whom were actually dead! These figures from history were nominated for election to immortality in the ‘spiritual’ division of the club. Shakespeare made it but Beethoven did not. The living members of the club were encouraged to play practical jokes, robustly critique each other’s work and to drink a lot. Enclosed in his almost silent world and surrounded by like-minded souls, Lawson revelled in the creativity of the club and found drinking broke down the barriers that set him apart from so many others. He could be as unappealing as any drunk, and the black dog of depression forever tailed him, but he was a man who valued his mates and they valued him.

  Lawson’s many friends forgave him his weaknesses and rallied around him when he fell. In March 1896, he lost one of those friends when Charles Lind shot himself at Manly. Lind left a note to Lawson that read in part:

  Harry, my boy . . . you have frequently heard me remark how I looked upon all in this world and all that is connected with it as a farce, more or less hideous, and a horrible farce, and I will simply add that now in the face of the inevitable I have no reason to alter my opinion. Good-bye, old chap.

  A month after this devastating blow, Henry had a chance at a new beginning when he married Bertha Bredt. It might have been something of an omen that he had to borrow £10 to pay for the wedding. Almost immediately, the newlyweds moved to Western Australia to join a rush for gold but failed to strike it rich, or even find permanent work. After a short time living in a tent they returned to Sydney where things were looking up, thanks to the publication by Angus & Robertson of two of Lawson’s books, In the Days When the World Was Wide and While the Billy Boils. Both were well received by critics and readers, and Lawson’s star as a writer was further on the rise.

  But his return to Sydney also meant a return to his old ways. It was a recipe for conflict. Bertha wanted family and domesticity. Henry wanted to write and drink with his bohemian friends. There were arguments. Henry wrote productively, but, as usual, he mismanaged the finances and the couple’s income was uncertain. Making it worse, Henry held a strange torch for Hannah Thorburn, a young woman who modelled for an artist friend. The nature of their relationship is not known, but Hannah cast such a spell over Lawson that she emerged in his later writings as a romanticised ideal of womanhood. For Bertha, it was all too much.

  In desperation, she persuaded him to look for work in New Zealand, hoping that removing him from his usual haunts would save him from his demons. Armed with a letter of introduction from J.F. Archibald, Henry and Bertha arrived in Wellington in April 1897, where Henry secured a job teaching at a remote Maori school in Mangamaunu on the South Island. Bertha had extra reason to hope the isolation of the remote coastal community would save her husband from himself. She was pregnant with their first child.

  But after an initial burst of enthusiasm, Lawson found Mangamaunu stifling. He struggled to relate to the Maori communities he was trying to serve and, in an alien culture, his creative well ran all but dry. It was another disaster. In October he and Bertha returned to Wellington where Bertha delivered little Joseph Henry (Jim). As soon as they were able, they moved back to Sydney, Bertha hoping that somehow it would be different this time. Predictably, it was not.

  In Sydney, Henry was given a sinecure in the Government Statistician’s Office. He soon lost the job, possibly because he found the process of clocking in and clocking out demeaning but, away from the vacuum of remote Mangamaunu, his art returned. Although he barely seems to have appreciated it, he owed much for this to his friends and colleagues. As always, Archibald continued to support him, while George Robertson was generous with advances and loans. And not least, his friendly rival, Barty Paterson, continued to help with free legal advice and negotiations with publishers.

  In an anecdote that reveals his relationship with Lawson was a friendly one, Paterson later recalled paying a visit to the Lawson home in Sydney at around this time. He was pleased to learn from Bertha that Henry was working.

  ‘What’s he working at?’ asked Paterson, ‘prose or verse?’

  ‘Oh, no!’ replied Bertha. ‘I don’t mean writing. I mean working. He’s gone back to his trade as a house painter.’

  As always, the house painting was sporadic and the family continued to struggle financially. Under the pressure, Henry’s drinking worsened. In November he was admitted, not for the last time, to a sanatorium for inebriates—a respite which seems to have slowed his decline. Bertha was supportive at first, writing regularly to her husband pledging her love and urging him to recover. It seemed to be paying off. When Henry was discharged he stopped drinking and a relatively stable period followed. He revised In the Days When the World Was Wide for a new edition to be published in 1900, and received some promising offers from publishers in London.

  He became convinced that success lay overseas, a point he made clear in ‘Pursuing Literature in Australia’, a personal statement that appeared in the January 1899, edition of The Bulletin. In it, Lawson wrote negatively of a system that failed to financially reward Australian writers and concluded with bitter advice to young writers to leave Australia for London, America, Timbuctoo, anywhere—or else ‘shoot himself carefully with the aid of a looking glass’. Unfairly, ‘Pursuing Literature in Australia’ did not acknowledge that most of its author’s problems were self-inflicted, nor did it recognise the generous support he had received from Robertson or Archibald. It did, however, give a strong sense of Lawson’s discontent at a world that failed to reward a man for his work.

  It was a reality that might have occurred to Barty Paterson in June that year, when acting as Lawson’s lawyer he secured £5 for Henry from The Bulletin for various works. On 20 April 1900, with the help of benefactors including George Robertson, Lawson sailed with his family to Britain. He later remembered it in verse as ‘That wild run to London/That wrecked and ruined me’. In truth, however, his ruin had begun long before he went to England.

  Paterson, meanwhile, had done some travelling of his own. In September 1898, he had sailed on the Guthrie to Darwin after accepting a commission to write a tourist guide encouraging travellers to visit the remote Northern Territory. It was an assignment he enjoyed. He later told a newspaper reporter the journey was inspired by ‘that intense desire to get away into the wilds which you think few only have trod’. In Darwin, he played tennis against some locals and gave them a thrashing. But he was keen to see the bush and wasted little time in getting away to the ‘wilds’. Soon he was shooting crocodiles and buffaloes on the hard fringes of the northern coast. Hunting the buffalo, he said, was ‘about twice as dangerous as going to war’.

  He joined a party of shooters at a buffalo camp, sleeping on the hard ground under a mosquito net and living on damper and buffalo meat. Riding a specially trained horse, Paterson bagged several large bulls by riding alongside the gall
oping beasts and firing from close range with a carbine. He earned praise for his shooting skills from Darwin’s Northern Territory Times and Gazette, which said the poet from Sydney, did ‘fairly well for a novice’. When he left the Territory on 28 October, Paterson took with him some buffalo horns. This pleased the Times which thought the souvenirs should be ample proof ‘to some of the sceptics of the south that there are buffalo in the Northern Territory’.

  Paterson saw the Territory as a place of massive, unrealised potential and, so far, a colossal failure. He noted that its aridness and extremes had combined to defy all efforts to develop it, yet its possibilities were endless. In an article for The Sydney Morning Herald in 1901, he noted that Darwin had a fine port within easy reach of Asian markets but it ‘does not ship a single horse north and there is not even a freezing works—a thing that every little town in New Zealand has got’. His list of frustrations at the Territory’s unfulfilled potential went on but he never lost faith in its possibilities. As late as 1935, he was still urging young men to go north.

  His visit to Darwin prompted some nationalistic political rumination where he worried about the threat to Australian jobs from imported Asian labour. He warned the Territory was ‘clamouring for the introduction of the cheap and nasty Chow’ and that northern Australia was at risk of being overrun by Asians:

  Only eight days’ steam from our Northern Territory there lies the great seething cauldron of the East, boiling over with parti-coloured humanity—brown and yellow men by the million, and they are quite near enough to us to do a lot of harm if their ideas run that way . . . Furthermore, our Northern Territory, practically uninhabited by whites, is just the place to suit these people. On those great sweltering, steaming, fever-laden plains, where the muddy rivers struggle slowly to the sea, the Orientals are in their glory. If they once get a good footing there, they will out-breed and out-multiply any European race.

  This fear of Asian colonisation later materialised in some of his poetry. In 1923, he published ‘A Job for McGuinness’, a short poem telling of a white man’s inability to find employment. Paterson wrote that McGuinness might only find work in a trench, with a gun in his hand, when the ‘Chow and the Jap begin to drift down from the tropics’. In an era where White Australia still had decades to run, his concerns were shared by tens of thousands of Australians. It is worth noting that the motto of The Bulletin then—and for many years to come—was ‘Australia for the White Man’.

  One of the great political issues of the late nineteenth century was Federation. The ambitious idea that Australia might become one nation under a central government was an unpopular one for some, but it had powerful supporters. The influential New South Wales Premier, Sir Henry Parkes, was chief among them. A champion of a united Australian government since 1867, he had set the tide of change in motion in 1889 with a stirring speech at the town of Tenterfield in the colony’s north. His ‘Tenterfield Address’ was a pivotal moment in the maturing of Australia.

  Parkes arrived in Tenterfield by train on the afternoon of Friday 25 October. He was met with delight by the citizens. Hundreds gathered at the station to welcome him, all the stores were closed and a brass band played in the streets. The mayor gave a short speech in which he described Parkes as ‘an ornament and delight to society’. Modestly, the premier replied that the townsfolk were too kind. He said the praise accorded to him fell short of his actual achievements but was undoubtedly heartened by the cries of ‘No, no!’ that rang out from the crowd as he uttered these self-deprecating remarks. Pleased with his reception, he retired to his hotel to prepare to deliver a speech at a banquet that evening.

  In the speech, Parkes put an impassioned case for Australia’s three and a half million people to have an army run by one government, railway gauges that were uniform across the land, a single customs service rather than many, and a national parliament with two houses ruling for the benefit of all. The vision was of a government for white men. The vote would be denied to Aborigines, people of Chinese and Indian descent, women and the poor, but Australians would be one in nationhood. Applause and cheers boomed out in the hall as Parkes called for a convention to discuss the formation of a federal government. It seemed Federation had popular support, at least in Tenterfield.

  The first Federation convention, in 1891, drafted a bill for the national Constitution, but many in the colonies were unconvinced. Victoria was relatively enthusiastic, but there was strong opposition in free trade-minded New South Wales, while the smaller colonies were wary of centralised government and worried that a federal union would hit their tariff incomes. When Parkes was forced to resign the premiership in October 1891, his dream of a united commonwealth seemed to be fading away. But by the time of his death in April 1896, support for Federation had begun to grow. The slow pace of change prompted some newspapers in Sydney to declare federation ‘as dead as Julius Caesar’ but in that year another federation conference began. In 1898, referenda were held on a Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Bill. It won majorities in all six colonies, but only narrowly in New South Wales, where the idea still had strong opposition. Among the sticking points was a conflict between the two biggest colonies over where a national capital should be sited.

  As the debate continued, Paterson poked fun at the stick-in-the-muds in New South Wales with 1898’s ‘Johnny Riley’s Cow, a Ballad of Federation’. In the poem, Johnny Riley was ‘down on Federation’ because his cow kept crossing the Murray River into Victoria. Each time the wayward beast splashed across the border, poor Johnny had to pay fines to the Victorians. He thought Federation would be the ruin of New South Wales. But the cow, who was Queensland-bred, cared nothing for the squabble between Sydney and Melbourne and favoured Federation—‘one people east and west—/And all may do as I do—travel where the grass is best’. It highlighted the silliness of a border separating people who were already one in identity.

  In June 1899, Paterson took another shot at Federation opponents in New South Wales, with ‘The Federal Bus Conductor and the Old Lady’. It urged ‘the old lady’ to stop talking and get on board:

  Now ’urry, Mrs New South Wales, and come along of us,

  We’re all a-goin’ ridin’ in the Federation ’bus.

  A fam’ly party, don’t you know—yes, Queenslan’s comin’ too.

  You can’t afford it! Go along! We’ve kep’ box seat for you.

  The very one of all the lot that can afford it best,

  You’ll only have to pay your share the same as all the rest.

  The stragglers, New South Wales and Western Australia, finally joined the ‘Federation bus’ and the colonies were officially united on 1 January 1901. Australia, at last, was a commonwealth. The vexed question of the capital was solved in 1908 by a decision to build it in a sparsely populated area known as Canberra, about half way between Sydney and Melbourne. Edmund Barton—a relative of Paterson’s on his mother’s side—became Australia’s first prime minister.

  By that time, much had happened in the life of A.B Paterson. He had been to the Boer War in South Africa and when Federation was declared, he was preparing for a voyage to China. Henry Lawson—who wrote rather disdainfully ‘the men who made Australia had federated long ago’—was in London sinking further into torment, and Harry Morant was on a course towards infamy. Australia was coming of age and Paterson would be there to record its growing pains.

  9

  THE BOER WAR

  While Australians were struggling with the complexities of Federation, the wider British Empire was becoming increasingly preoccupied by steadily worsening strife in another far-off colony—South Africa. In 1880, the Boers—descendants of independently minded Dutch settlers—had declared independence in the Transvaal in the country’s north-eastern region, and inflicted a heavy defeat on a British force. It ended in an uneasy stalemate that saw the Boers granted their independence in the Transvaal and neighbouring Orange Free State. The discovery of a massive gold reef at the Witwatersrand in the Bo
er republic caused tensions to rise. The Boers were short of resources and manpower, and reluctantly decided to bring in ‘uitlanders’, or foreigners, to help exploit the gold find. Many of the uitlanders were of British stock and so many arrived that they threatened to outnumber the Boers, giving powerful numerical support to the British.

  There was conflict between the Boers and the foreigners as an expansionist Britain eyed off the Witwatersrand gold as well as fabulous diamond riches in the Kimberley. The Boers saw a British invasion as inevitable and in 1899, they launched a pre-emptive strike. It led to a war that pitted the might of the British army with men from around the world against Boer farmers, either volunteering or commandeered to fight. It was, at first, a close-run thing.

  As the threat of war loomed, the Australian newspapers were sure it would be a one-sided contest. Adelaide’s The Advertiser said it would be a disgrace to be beaten by the Boers but there would be no glory in victory. Rival paper, The Register, felt the Boer fighter was not a match for his British counterpart and was confident the competitiveness of the Australian colonies meant a stream of men would lend ‘their aid in support of the Empire’. Although the Boers soon proved to be much tougher opponents than expected, the papers at least got it right when they predicted enthusiasm from Australian volunteers. When war was formally declared on 11 October, men in cities, towns and villages across the country rushed to join up.

  The volunteers’ names were published in the papers and town bands played as the men boarded trains at crowded stations on the first stage of their journeys to the front. Australia was doing its duty to the mother country and the colonies competed to see who could be the best son. In Perth, The Western Mail acknowledged that the people of that colony were ‘West Australians first and Australians second’. Even when it came to the send-off for the soldiers, the Mail said, the west did it better than the rest, and as for the quality of the men, ‘we are pretty sure that none of the sections of Australasia can place a squad of finer physique in the field’.