by Paul Terry
*
Barty Paterson, who had declared in his diary in November 1902 that he was ‘henceforth a journalist’, had undoubtedly watched the women’s suffrage debate unfold in the newspapers. He may have got some of his information from the light and lively Sydney paper, The Evening News, which enjoyed the debate over the women’s issue. For every outraged letter writer who spouted that women desired to be submissive to their husband’s political views, the News had allowed another to express a view that women had as much right to have a say in the affairs of state as their menfolk. In April, the paper had printed a long story about Ida Evans, ‘the state’s first lady lawyer’, and in September, three months after the Franchise Act, the News carried a front-page interview with Miss Rose Scott, one of the leading architects of female suffrage.
It was at The Evening News that Paterson landed his first full-time job in journalism. In January 1903, he was appointed not as a reporter, but as the editor. It was a lofty position for one so relatively inexperienced, but the lawyer-turned-newspaper-man applied a simple philosophy to the job. ‘The best editors are not necessarily trained journalists at all,’ he later said. ‘What they need is not the ability so much to write but also the ability to be right.’ Paterson could do the former very well, but as editor he sometimes fell short on the latter.
At first glance, the racy News does not appear to have been a perfect fit for its conservative new editor but he seems to have jumped in enthusiastically. The headlines in his first month in the chair ranged from the dramatic (‘Boat bottom up; A lad’s gallant act’) to the sensational (‘Priest murders his sweetheart’) to the trivial (‘Unexpected chickens: Hatched by the heatwave’). Late in the month, the paper got slightly carried away when it reported thirty people were in hospital in the town of Forbes, suffering from typhoid fever. The News published a correction after the aggrieved mayor of that town pointed out that there were, in fact, only nine cases of the disease.
It was only a minor setback for the new editor. From his inky, untidy office, dominated by a paper-littered roll-top desk and crowded with overflowing pigeon holes, Paterson rather laconically went about bringing his own style to the paper. In doing so, he won the affection of his fellow ‘ink-slingers’. Fifty years later, Claude McKay, a reporter who began his career under Paterson, recalled how the paper’s sub-editor, a round and ruddy chap who got himself invited to every banquet in town, was put on a strict diet by his doctor. The devastated sub-editor unleashed a tale of woe on his boss:
I am not to eat cabbage, Barty. I’m fond of cabbage dished up and cut across, with pepper and butter. And I’m fond of mashed potatoes, with plenty of pepper and butter. I’m ordered to have neither . . . I can give up cabbage, Barty, but I can’t, I can’t . . . I can’t give up mashed potatoes!
McKay always remembered his editor’s ‘long, weather-beaten face lighting with that attractive, humorous smile’ when he recounted the hungry sub-editor’s anguish.
According to McKay, Paterson hated to be alone in his office, where he sat alone with ‘an habitual look of bewilderment’. When visitors arrived, Paterson welcomed them like a long-lost brother, leaning back in his chair and comfortably yarning as if there were no deadlines and no paper to produce. Somehow, under this casual guidance, the paper hit the streets three or four times every day. But what most endeared Paterson to his staff was a decision to pay contributors by the line, which meant a reporter could earn as much as a guinea for a full column of copy. He also hired a political cartoonist—a rarity for the time—and injected some of his own interests into the pages. These changes included increased coverage of sport, especially horseracing, and the introduction of a series of stories on native wildlife.
Paterson understood what readers wanted and the News won the evening circulation battle but he lacked the killer instinct that an editor needs. His paper was scooped several times by the opposition, which labelled Paterson ‘Banjoey’ and his paper, ‘The Snooze’. Sometimes, the paper’s problems were self-inflicted. In one edition, the artist Lionel Lindsay drew a cartoon of Rome with seven hills, an organ grinder and monkey atop each one. Sydney’s Italians were outraged. The celebrated Sydney artist Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo was so angry that he challenged Lindsay to a duel. Luckily for Lindsay, the duel never proceeded but The Daily Telegraph was quick to pounce:
All the Dagos in the metropolitan area are after [Paterson’s] scalp in consequence. In Thursday’s issue of the ‘Snooze’ Banjoey rises to explain that it was only a joke. ‘A sense of humour does not seem to be characteristic of the Italian people’, claims the plaintive humorist. The famous Banjoey himself is not an Italian. His frozen humour, however, is characteristic of imitation hokey-pokey compounded from the mountain snows amongst which he sought his saddened inspiration.
This was unfair. Whatever shortcomings Paterson had as a newspaper editor, there was nothing wrong with his sense of humour. Not that everybody saw the funny side of his newspaper’s writings. In May 1903, the News had to apologise for offending a popular rugby union player, James ‘Bull’ Joyce by describing him as ‘ferocious’ and ‘a ruffian’ on the field. Joyce—who was a champion forward and goal kicker for Glebe and had also represented Australia—was actually an even-tempered and fair player and his friends at the Glebe club were quick to rise to his defence. When a delegation of outraged rugby players made a forceful visit to the offices of the News, there was nobody there to meet them. In its apology a week later, the News stated that all the staff just happened to be out at the time. The Star, however, implied that ‘Banjoey’ and his colleagues had bolted down the fire escape as the footballers barged through the front door.
An editor’s job is never an easy one and Paterson found his to be demanding and stressful, although it might have helped that his personal life was now on a settled path. On 8 April 1903, at the age of thirty-nine, he had married Alice Walker at her family home, Tenterfield Station. The region’s leading citizens packed the town’s Presbyterian Church to see the couple take their vows. The women’s pages in the newspapers reported the bride wore a trained gown of white crepe-de-Chine with a shirred skirt and a bodice decorated with Brussels lace. The veil was fastened with a diamond star. Alice’s sister Bessie was the only bridesmaid. She wore a pearl crescent brooch that was a gift from the bridegroom. Barty’s best man was William Kelly—a minister in the Federal Government and a member of fashionable clubs in Sydney and Melbourne.
Many of the station workers had known the bride since she was a child and, showing the affection in which she was held, they ‘tastefully decorated’ the church before returning to the homestead to await the arrival of the happy couple. The reception at the homestead was an intimate affair with only the staff and close friends and family present. A gossip column in the papers rather tastelessly reported that ‘numerous and costly presents were given’. Touchingly, the station workers presented Alice with a silver salver, and the ladies committee of the Presbyterian Church gave the newlyweds two silver trinket boxes.
Following an afternoon tea, Barty made a short speech of ‘well-chosen words’ of thanks and then the couple departed, Alice strikingly attired in a dress of electric blue and a white felt hat trimmed with large pink roses. They had their honeymoon in the mountains near Cooma.
They made their first home at ‘West Hall’ in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra. In February 1904, they welcomed their first child—a girl. It made news in gossip pages around the country with The Barrier Miner in Broken Hill suggesting ‘the little stranger should be called Banjo-sephine’. Not surprisingly, the proud parents did not take up this suggestion and named their little girl Grace. Now, with Barty’s career as a newspaperman settled and his family started, his professional and personal life seemed fulfilled.
*
The new century had been less kind to Paterson’s fellow ‘deity of The Bulletin’. Henry Lawson’s return from London had brought more strife to his troubled, alcohol-plagued life. While Barty’s married life was j
ust beginning, Henry’s was coming to an end. At the same time as the Patersons said ‘I do’, Henry’s long-suffering wife was saying ‘I don’t’. In April 1903, she successfully applied for a judicial separation, leaving her troubled husband alone and with two children to support financially.
It was the latest shattering development in Lawson’s downward spiral. In December the previous year, he had leapt in despair from a cliff at Manly and was found at the water’s edge, semi-conscious and in great pain from a broken ankle and a large wound over his right eye. The papers said the cliff was about 30 metres high. It was a tragic low point in Henry’s troubled life, but Paterson later recalled the incident in humorous tones, showing that Lawson was able to see the funny side of his own misfortune:
Lawson had an experience which happens to few people. He fell over a cliff at Manly and was reported dead. There was no time to make inquiries, so a section of the Press came out with very flattering obituary notices, which Henry read with great interest and enthusiasm. I asked him what he thought of these final ‘reviews;’ and he said that, after reading them, he was puzzled to think how he had managed to be so hard up all his life!
Lawson’s Children of the Bush, published in 1902, had been well received and his Joe Wilson series, most of which was written in London, would be remembered as some of his greatest work. These bittersweet, semi-autobiographical tales reflected the memories of a man who watched the dreams of youth destroyed by the gritty reality of failed middle age. As the grim years of the new century marched on, Lawson’s life began to more and more closely mimic his art.
The loss of his family had taken what little stability that remained in his life and he had retreated further into alcohol and depression. He drifted around the inner suburbs of Sydney, working a little and drinking a lot. Sometimes he could be seen at Circular Quay waving a tin cup and begging for donations. He liked to gather threepence from each mark and, when he had collected a few shillings, he would retire to a pub where each threepence could purchase a long glass of beer. It was during one such begging excursion that he performed a heroic act.
Just after lunch on 27 December 1904, Ettie Thrush, a married woman, gently placed her baby on the North Shore wharf and then leapt into the water, hoping to drown. Without hesitation, Henry Lawson jumped fully clothed into the harbour and held Mrs Thrush above water until she could be helped to safety. She was taken to hospital and her baby to an orphanage. When asked why she had jumped, Mrs Thrush replied, ‘I have got my troubles.’ It was a sentiment that Henry could fully understand for he had more than enough troubles of his own.
Whatever money he scraped up was never enough and he frequently defaulted on his family support payments. Bertha loved Henry, and despite his faults, she had tried to rebuild their relationship after their return from London. She was supportive of him during his treatments at the asylum and held out hope that he could mend his ways. But as time went by, she became increasingly desperate as Henry repeatedly failed to support his children and she fell into deeper hardship. It did not help that she loathed Henry’s mother Louisa. Fed up, in 1903, Bertha refused to let Henry see his children unless he could prove he was no longer a ‘low drunkard’. By July 1905, her situation had become so dire that she brought him to court on a charge of wife desertion. Eight weeks behind in his payments, he was sentenced to pay £12 5s 6d, or spend three weeks and three days in prison. Virtually penniless, he was sent to Darlinghurst Gaol that afternoon.
When hard times struck, Lawson was always quick to press his publishers and friends for money and he rarely faced a harder time than his first day in prison. He immediately wrote from his cell to Fred Shenstone of Angus & Robertson, asking for a ‘pound or two’ in advance for his next book. He also asked Shenstone to rally his friends for support, but for once, his friends could not help him and he served his full term. Later, he described the grim convict-era Darlinghurst prison as ‘Starvinghurst’ because of the lean rations behind the high walls. It was there that he wrote a poem he called ‘One Hundred and Three’—his own prison number. It gives an insight into his sense of bitterness.
The clever scoundrels are all outside, and the moneyless mugs in gaol—
Men do 12 months for a mad wife’s lies, or Life for a strumpet’s tale.
If the people knew what the warders know, and felt as the prisoners feel—
If the people knew, they would storm their gaols as they stormed the old Bastille.
But, as unpleasant as prison was, it was not enough for him to mend his ways. There was more trouble ahead. His friends never gave up on him but they were fighting a losing battle.
*
While Lawson was struggling with alcohol, prison and family troubles, Barty Paterson was preparing to embark on another exciting journey—the first-ever motoring trial between Sydney and Melbourne. Organised by a canny thinker from the Dunlop rubber company, the 1905 trial tested man and machine in a feat of endurance. Nothing like it had ever been seen in Australia. For Paterson, who had been a fan of the motor car since taking a ride with Rudyard Kipling four years earlier, it was an opportunity too good to pass up.
He assigned himself to accompany a friend, Colonel Jack Arnott of the biscuit company, in a twenty-horsepower Innes car that could whiz along at a staggering speed. Although the car would complete the job started by the steam train and kill off the horse as the main means of transport, Paterson was excited by its prospects. He also noted the potential of the car to meet a great Australian passion—having a punt. He wrote in The Evening News at the time, ‘The only objection to the cars is that they frighten the horses, but the Australian looks upon a race of any sort as a sacred thing.’
The reliability trial was a grand enterprise that saw the first petrol-driven cars and motorcycles complete the 572-mile (920-kilometre) journey from Sydney to Melbourne. Over five days, the twenty-three competitors, including one ‘plucky’ woman driver from South Australia, would cover the huge distance of more than 100 miles (160 kilometres) a day. It was not a race, but rather a test of attrition to see how the machines and their drivers would hold up to the challenges of distance, rough roads and mechanical misfortune. The competitors would earn points by reaching each stage of the journey in the best time. Those who avoided crashing, breaking down or coming to a humiliating halt in deep gullies that were scored across what passed as roads would be the winners. It was, said The Sydney Morning Herald, a chance to learn ‘everything pertaining to the general excellence of motors’.
The fleet of motorcycles and cars gathered in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield before dawn on the morning of 21 February. The flat-capped and moustachioed motorcyclists set off first, the spluttering and backfiring of their machines punctuating the early morning darkness. The cars set out soon afterwards, their drivers and passengers cloaked in caps, goggles and heavy white driving coats. Hundreds of people turned out to see this strange armada roar its way through the quiet city streets. The small boys among the onlookers were particularly excited, and shouted for the drivers to ‘shake her up’ as the engines growled and the unfamiliar odour of exhaust gases hung in the air.
The motorcyclists quickly roared ahead while the going was easy but they slowed down when they reached the Razorback, a long and steady climb south-west of the city. The first of the cars, including Paterson’s, soon caught up and then passed the motorcyclists, who had dismounted and were trying in vain to coax their machines back to life. This came as no surprise to Paterson. He could ride a horse as if he were part of it, but the motorcycle held little appeal. He thought the ‘man who rides a motorcycle for pleasure, would go to the infernal regions for pastime’.
In a story for The Evening News, under a subheading, ‘The History of the Haste Wagon’, Paterson wrote that the car was like an untiring horse. He described how he and Arnott roared through a cloud of dust, the air filled with the aroma of half-dry gum leaves as the homesteads and distant blue hills slid past in an exhilarating blur. The first car rumbled into the to
wn of Goulburn, 200 kilometres from Sydney, just before midday, having completed the journey in less than six hours. The rest of the field trundled into town during the afternoon to be greeted by ‘a singing, jabbering mass of small boys, agriculturists and local oracles, all explaining to each other all about motor cars’:
As each fresh car comes in there is a wild rush, and the small boys push each other nearly under the wheels, and just as the throng is thickest a Yankee driver, with a face like granite, sends two thousand pounds’ weight of priceless mechanism in amongst them, and the mob scatters and drifts up and down the street, fingering the cars that are waiting by the road side filling up and making adjustments before being handed over. Each fresh chauffeur is a thing of less beauty than the last, and Goulburn has not got reconciled to their peaked caps, their goggles, and their iron features.
Day two of the trial sorted the contenders from the pretenders when the road from Goulburn to Yass deteriorated rapidly. In some places, deep gutters had been scored across the surface and cars began to drop out with bent axles and ruined tyres. The attrition did little to dampen public enthusiasm for the spectacle; it seemed that almost every person standing on the roadside had a Dunlop scorebook in which each vehicle could be checked and ticked off as it passed. Paterson wrote that most of the onlookers were thrilled to see the dashing machines roaring along the road—with one exception ‘who cursed us with great fluency’.
Paterson and Arnott also suffered a setback when they shattered a wheel on a cross-country short cut. It threatened to derail their journey until some flour mill mechanics at Albury saved the day by bolting stout lengths of timber to the broken wheel. The ‘lady driver’, Mrs Thompson, was another to suffer a mishap near Albury. She ran off the road but was towed out by ‘yokels’ and arrived in the border town late that evening. The road behind had been littered with bits and pieces from the flying cars. Tools, driving coats, oil cans and gloves were lost to the wind, the drivers in too much of a rush to stop.