Banjo

by Paul Terry

  I don’t know about the girlishly emotional part of the book. I leave that to girl readers to judge; but the descriptions of Bush life and scenery came startlingly, painfully real to me, and I know that, as far as they are concerned, the book is true to Australia—the truest I ever read.

  My Brilliant Career was published in 1901 and went on to become an Australian classic. Despite its success—or more likely because of it—the book brought only limited happiness to its author. Members of Franklin’s family were outraged at seeing themselves reflected negatively in the novel’s characters. Some of her relatives even threatened to sue. The artist Norman Lindsay, who met a young Franklin at The Bulletin offices soon after the book was published, said Franklin’s ‘stuffy, scandalised Victorian relations’ scared her so much that she was forced to flee to England.

  Meanwhile, Henry once again made a mess of his financial affairs. Soon he was broke and fell to hounding publishers for extra advances or accelerated royalty payments. Much of the money that came disappeared in the pub. The strain on Bertha was immense and in March 1901, she was admitted to a London hospital for treatment of mental illness, probably severe depression. A census taken at the end of the month listed Bertha as being a ‘lunatic’ under treatment while Henry was shown as living in a three-roomed flat at Clovelly Mansions with their one-year-old daughter, Bertha Louisa. Their son Joe was not listed on the census but the papers showed a servant named Lizzie Humphrey was sharing the flat. It is possible that Henry and Lizzie—who was described in a newspaper gossip column as an ‘attractive domestic’—were romantically involved, which could help to explain Bertha’s breakdown.

  The details of whatever went wrong remain clouded, but in May 1902, Henry wrote to The Bulletin to say that Bertha and the children would return to Australia in June and he, Henry, would follow them when he completed work on a new book. The letter explained the depth of his latest decline:

  [I] have been wonderfully successful from a literary point of view, but my health has completely broken down, and I must come home for a year or so. Some of my stories are being translated into German. I know London as well as I know the Bush, and propose to write of London for the Australian papers and of Australia for the London papers.

  Bertha and the children sailed from Southampton on the German ship, the Kahlsruhe, and Henry followed in the sister ship, the Gera. He met up with his family at Colombo and they sailed together for Adelaide. But this journey was the last they would take together. The straws that held together the unhappy marriage of Henry and Bertha finally collapsed somewhere between Colombo and Adelaide, and, when the ship docked in South Australia, Henry disembarked alone. He caught a train to Melbourne—while Bertha and the children remained on the ship for the final leg of their journey home to Sydney.

  *

  Barty Paterson, meanwhile, had found London to be everything he had hoped for. In stark contrast to Lawson’s experience in the same city, Paterson had enjoyed glittering nights at plays and musicals in the West End and suppers with celebrities in fine restaurants. He had arrived in October 1901, just in time to catch a wave of artistry with a handful of Australians at its crest. Chief among them was Phil May, the former comic artist with The Bulletin.

  An Englishman, May was wonderfully eccentric, immensely talented and forever broke. He was delighted to see his old friend and colleague Barty, not least because he had bought a horse he had not seen in a year and he wanted someone to ride it. May—‘an extraordinarily skinny man with a face like a gargoyle’—was always buying things he did not need and spending far more than he earned. The horse was just the latest in his collection.

  The shining lights of the city’s bohemians gathered most Sunday nights at May’s home in St John’s Wood for a celebration of creativity. The host sang sentimental ballads in a pleasant tenor voice while operatic stars hit high notes and actors schmoozed with promoters and financiers. May was regarded as ‘a kind of Aladdin’ in the theatre world because it seemed he only had to rub a lamp to find jobs for performers, and they all pressed him to get them meetings with producers and promoters. Many of the artists left the May home on those Sunday evenings secure for a few more weeks after finding a job in a new show—thanks to Phil’s good graces.

  May owned a bulldog—‘the cheeriest, kindest, slobberiest bulldog that anyone ever saw’. Phil’s wife insisted he take the dog when he went out to the pub at night, in the hope that the responsibility for the animal would bring him home before daylight. It tended to be a forlorn hope. Everyone wanted to buy Phil a drink and he rarely refused. After enjoying himself for a few hours, he often called for a cab to take the dog home. As Paterson recalled in a book of personal reminiscences, Happy Dispatches (1934), the dog’s outings proved to be an expensive business:

  The dog loved riding in cabs, and evidently had the idea that when he entered a cab he had bought it; for if there happened to be nobody at home when he arrived there, he would refuse to leave the cab and the cabman had to sit on the box and wait, perhaps for an hour two, until Mrs May came home. No wonder that Phil was chronically hard up!

  In November, Paterson went to the offices of The Times for a job interview. At first, he was treated with the disdain one might expect for a mere colonial in the offices of the great newspaper but, after being kept waiting for an hour, he finally met with the manager, Moberly Bell—‘a fine big personable man’. Paterson was pleased with the interview and wrote to George Robertson in Sydney to say that he expected to be appointed Australian correspondent for The Times.

  Paterson had been rather down at not being able to travel to Siberia as planned, but a chance to work for one of the world’s great papers was an incredible opportunity. He hoped to ‘put some new ideas into English heads about Australia’. Unfortunately, he was too optimistic and the job at The Times did not eventuate. He had to be content with writing verses for the Pink ’Un—a small bohemian publication which at that time was fighting a losing battle against the rise of the motor car.

  A disappointed Paterson found solace—as well as his own introduction to the motor car—when he went to stay with Rudyard Kipling at his ‘unpretentious house’ at Brighton. Barty did not know what to expect of Kipling but imagined a great literary genius must be seething with vice—a magnet for women, drink and trouble. Instead, he was almost disappointed to discover that Kipling and his charming American wife were unremarkable to the point of being ordinary. The only hint that Kipling was a great man came from the crowds of tourists, mostly Americans, who thronged about outside the house, hoping to get a look over the wall or an autograph from its famous occupant.

  Kipling owned houses in New York and Cape Town and told Paterson he was keen to live in Australia. Kipling had visited Australia once and although he knew little about the country, he did a good job in summing up its inhabitants when he told Paterson: ‘You people in Australia haven’t grown up yet. You think the Melbourne Cup is the most important thing in the world.’

  Kipling ‘hated publicity as his Satanic Majesty is supposed to hate holy water’ and therefore did not enjoy the attention of the autograph seekers. To avoid them, he had his car brought into the front garden so he could dash from his front step into the car and cruise past the crowds in splendid seclusion. He owned a series of British-made Lanchester cars and he received a new one just in time for Paterson’s visit. The great writer never actually drove the car, but it came with a chauffeur in overalls. Paterson and Kipling clambered into the back and in scenes conjuring up images of Toad of Toad Hall, they hurtled over the Sussex Downs, scattering ‘tourists right and left’:

  Away we went through the beautiful English lanes, where the leaves swirled after the car and one expected to see Puck of Pook’s Hill peering out from behind a tree. We passed military barracks, where Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd [fictional characters in Kipling’s Soldiers Three], with their swagger canes, were just setting out for a walk. We saw the stolid English farm labourers putting in the oak bridge that would
last for generations. We saw a sailing ship ploughing her way down the Channel, and noted ‘the shudder, the stumble, the roll as the star-stabbing bowsprit emerges’. It was like looking at a series of paintings and here at my side was the painter.

  Paterson’s stay with Kipling was a highlight of his journey and their glorious outing in the motor car that day was an experience Paterson never forgot. Just three years later, he would join a marvellous motoring adventure of his own, travelling all the way from Sydney to Melbourne in a remarkable convoy of cars and motorbikes. It was fitting that one of his last engagements in London was to recite a verse, ‘The Lay of the Motor Car’ at the Yorick Club in London. His time in England was at an end and soon he was aboard a ship, the fog-bound lights of London and the green and pleasant fields of the English countryside lying abeam as he headed back to the sunlit shores of home.

  Kipling might have been correct when he said Australians had not yet grown up, but Paterson had left behind a growing community of Australian artists in London—men and women who were showing that Australia, the brash child of Empire, could hold her own on the world stage. Australians were proving themselves on sporting fields and in theatres, galleries and concert halls. Some of the best and brightest were doing it in London. Among those bohemians with Australian connections who remained behind was the kindly, chaotic, hedonistic Phil May whose merry life was destined to be a short one.

  Paterson landed in Sydney in April 1902, with fond memories of his old friend. They never met again and May never returned to Australia. He died in August 1903, aged just thirty-nine. He left a lifetime of pleasant memories for his many friends and a mountain of debt to his many creditors. In an obituary, the Australian Town and Country Journal honoured Phil May as a man without an enemy—despite his many unpaid bills. The paper remembered how May had been so poor when he returned from Australia to London that he had slept under bridges and begged for broken biscuits in pubs, but even when he achieved greatness he never lost his head at the adulation he received. The Journal’s obituary summed up the impact he had on the artistic community with its final lines: ‘The kindly natured race of Bohemians, scattered like the Jews in all parts of the world will feel a sense of personal loss in the death of Phil May.’

  May had died leaving nothing for his widow, but the staff at Punch gave her a collection of May’s original drawings and people rushed to buy them. Mrs May cleared about £3000, thanks to the generosity of an artistic community that so admired her late husband. ‘The Bohemians of London may have had their weak points,’ wrote Paterson, ‘but they were prepared to pay their tribute to the greatest Bohemian of them all.’

  *

  Paterson’s footloose days as a single man were almost over, but there was to be one last hurrah before he settled down into marriage and a permanent career in journalism. A month after his return from London, he was asked by Sir James Burns of the trading firm Burns, Philp & Co to accompany a group of settlers seeking to find a foothold in the wild New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) in the South Pacific. For Burns, it was a strictly commercial enterprise; his firm had bought thousands of hectares of rich land from the island chiefs but competition from French investors and hostility from some of the tribespeople threatened the venture.

  Burns—whom Paterson described as being ‘as near to an empire builder as we ever saw in these parts’—believed possession would prove to be nine tenths of the law and that his firm would stand the best chance of locking in its land purchases if he had men ‘on the spot’. Paterson thought it sounded like an adventure and he agreed to visit the islands as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald.

  With a group of missionaries and settlers as shipmates, Paterson sailed for the South Pacific, via Norfolk Island in May 1902. He described his fellow travellers as ‘Australian Pilgrim Fathers in search of the land of the golden cocoa-nut’. He became friendly with the settlers—‘hard-handed, anxious-faced men’—whom he felt were born adventurers. They were the type, he later said, who would set off anywhere at the drop of a hat just for the sake of going somewhere new.

  They found a paradise at Norfolk Island—a place so abundant in sub-tropical riches that some of the settlers wanted to remain there instead of completing their journey to the New Hebrides. But even paradise has its pitfalls and a lady passenger on the ship was taken aback when she turned on a tap that emitted a stream of cockroaches, ‘all in the highest health and spirits’. Otherwise, Norfolk Island was a sleepy place. According to Paterson’s wry observations, even the horses had to be prodded into action with a nail in the end of a board. The people were similarly disinclined to haste. Paterson wrote of meeting a dentist who showed ‘several scars in his arm which he said had been made by sticking a knife into himself . . . to find out whether he was dead or alive’.

  Another paradise was found in the New Hebrides. The settlers were delighted with the riches of the land and the missionaries—many of whom were doctors—divided their time between preaching to the natives and tending to their illnesses. The French and Australian settlers got on well and discovered they had more in common than they had expected. Paterson felt the island settlement would prosper, and reported as much to Sir James when he returned to Australia in June. In the end, Paterson was proved wrong. The settlement failed as a commercial enterprise, partly because trade tariffs were erected and also because various governments never got around to making decisions.

  Paterson had only just returned to Sydney when he received some tragic news—his younger brother Hamilton had been killed in an explosion on a boat off the coast of New Guinea. Hamilton had recently overseen the installation of an oil-fired engine on the converted cutter Endeavour and was working on the engine when a Malay crew member took a naked flame too close to spilt fuel. The fuel exploded, blowing the boat apart. The Malay man was killed instantly and twenty-five-year-old Hamilton died two days later. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Hamilton was a former Sydney Grammar boy and a champion rower who ‘was of a particularly fearless disposition’.

  In the wake of this loss, Barty undertook another lecture tour, and when he visited the town of Tenterfield he resumed his acquaintance with the well-bred young lady, Alice Walker. It had been seven years since Barty had attended Alice’s coming out party in Sydney but each had surely made an impression on the other because they married less than six months after Paterson’s visit to Tenterfield in late 1902. It was a happy union that lasted until Barty’s death almost forty years later.

  12

  NEWSMAN

  While Paterson was sailing for the New Hebrides, the war that had made his name as a correspondent was declared over. After three years of increasingly savage fighting the British were the victors, but their reputation was blackened by the brutal tactics with which they won. Kitchener’s scorched earth policy—the program of systematically destroying Boer farms while rounding up thousands of civilians for internment in concentration camps—was horrifyingly cruel and savagely effective. By the end of the war, more than 26,000 white men, women and children had died of malnutrition and disease and an estimated 14,000 native Africans had died in separate camps. The British had won control of the former Boer republics, but at a terrible cost.

  In Australia, the worst drought since European settlement was in its penultimate, hardest year. The so-called Federation Drought had cured the land to its rocky bones. The ground cracked open, creeks and rivers became meandering scars of dust and pastures were burnt away, leaving only sunbaked earth. Millions of sheep and cattle died and farmers walked away from land that had become all but worthless. Work dried up along with the farmlands and the wandering bushman was in dire straits.

  Yet, at the same time, Australia was continuing to grow up. Just one year after Federation and now tempered by war, Australians were learning to make decisions on their own. One of those decisions made the young nation among the most politically enlightened in the world. On 12 June 1902, the national parliament passed the Commonwealth Franchise Act, instantl
y giving most women (indigenous women excepted) not only the vote, but also the previously unthinkable right to stand for public office.

  Many men, and some women, felt women were too weak and too prone to hysteria to be trusted with the serious business of choosing a government, far less being a member of one. It was thought that even those who could control their emotions would be too easily distracted by the more pressing business of managing homes and rearing children. But some forward-thinking women had been quietly proving they could mix it with the men, and of course they managed to do it without hysteria or weakness. It was a sign of changing times, but there were still many hurdles to leap. Conservatives noted with disapproval that some of these uppity women even dared to drink and smoke and ride bicycles!

  Suffragette meetings had been held in Melbourne and Sydney throughout the 1880s and 1890s as the push for equality gained momentum. Activists told a meeting in Sydney that Iceland, which had already enfranchised women, was a land with ‘no illiterate person to be found, no prison, no police, no thieves, and no army’. It was suggested Australia could become the same utopia if women were allowed to vote. But not every woman wanted that right. In South Australia—which had given voting rights to women way back in 1894—four women presented a petition to parliament saying political equality deprived women of the special privileges they had hitherto enjoyed.

  But the tide of change could not be stemmed, thanks largely to the efforts of early feminists such as Louisa Lawson, publisher of The Dawn newspaper and mother of Henry. Rather bitterly, Louisa wrote in 1890: ‘Men govern the world and the schemes on which all our institutions are founded show men’s thoughts only.’ Nine years later, she helped to found the suffragette Dawn Club in Sydney and three years after that, Australian women became some of the first in the world to win the vote. Thanks to the drive and dedication of a handful of brave women like Louisa Lawson, the country built on the masculine legend of the bushman had allowed women at least some of the same political rights as men.