Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  Accompanied by two doctors who worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Loir arrived in Australia in 1888 to begin work on the issue. But he faced the immediate problem that New South Wales had passed a law forbidding the introduction of foreign microbes and that Victorian law forbade experiments by people who were not doctors. Just the same, he was able to earn some revenue for the Pasteur Institute by advising Thomas Aitken, owner of the Victoria Brewery, on developing brewing cultures for the manufacture of Victoria Bitter.

  In Sydney there was a meeting between Mr Abigail and the French, from which Loir got the impression that the chicken-cholera method was being ruled out by the government. But soon Loir and the others were called to appear before the Commission on Rabbit Destruction. The owner of Tarella Station near Wilcannia had offered his property as a testing ground. Pasteur thought that the prize should be awarded after four to six weeks, whereas it became apparent at this meeting that the commission intended a year’s trial.

  By now Dr Archibald Watson, Professor of Anatomy at Adelaide University and a competitor for the prize, was selling rabbits infected with a fatal disease named ‘rabbit scab’ to South Australian farmers in the belief that, once introduced, it would kill all the other rabbits. Overall there were 1500 entries into the contest for rabbit eradication. Most of them were complicated machines for rabbit trapping. There were 115 biological submissions, of which forty-two came from the Australian colonies, six from New Zealand, and the rest from Britain and Ireland, the United States, France and from nearly every country in Europe.

  The Pasteur men were treated with widespread suspicion. A suggestion was made that Pasteur’s methods should be tried experimentally on an island. The young Dr Henry Allen, Professor of Medicine at Melbourne University, declared that one could not predict the direct or indirect impact of Loir’s chicken-cholera cultures. There was a perception amongst the public—which the anti-Pasteur people were willing to spread—that chicken cholera was a close relative of the fatal human disease just now being defeated in the cities by sanitary engineers. Allen cited all the latest research from Germany and France to attack the French plans.

  Loir and his team were sidelined into trying to find a cure, working with diseased sheep from a property in the Riverina owned by a pastoralist named Arthur Devlin. In a Sydney laboratory, Loir made cultures from the lesions on the dead sheep and tested them on mice. Loir declared that Cumberland disease was in fact anthrax. He tried it out on rabbits, which quickly died.

  Despite the prejudices against them, Parkes himself was anxious to keep the Frenchmen in Australia, and ordered the construction of a research station on Rodd Island near Iron Cove in the Parramatta River for them to carry out their research projects. But Parkes’ government showed no understanding of intellectual property and had the Experiment Committee of the Rabbit Commission performing the same experiments as the Pasteur team virtually as soon as Loir had reported them home. This was possible because Parkes had every telegram that came to Pasteur’s representatives in Australia, and every one they sent, presented to him and made available to cabinet and the bureaucracy. Parkes therefore saw that Pasteur had ordered his people by telegram not to proceed with any more anthrax research until they had solved the rabbit problem and won the prize. Since he thought that anthrax could more promptly be cured by the French to the colony’s great benefit, Parkes retained this telegram and did not pass it on to Loir, and ordered the Stock Department as well to carry on with anthrax trials in the Riverina, even as the French continued to research it at Rodd Island.

  Eventually William Lyne, a Protectionist, future premier and future federal member of Parliament, who himself owned a rabbit-infested station named Tyrie in the central west of New South Wales, asked Parkes in Parliament whether any communications from Pasteur to his representatives had been interfered with. Parkes admitted some early ones had been opened at the Colonial Secretary’s office by mistake, but had since been let go to Loir unopened.

  Loir and his Pasteur Institute colleague Dr Germont kept on carrying out animal anthrax experiments in an enclosed pasture on Yarah Station in the Riverina, near Junee. Soon 260 000 sheep were available for inoculation, but Pasteur had a better sense of intellectual property than Henry Parkes did, and on 20 October 1888 Pasteur sent a telegram to Loir telling him to instruct the New South Wales government that a supply of the anthrax vaccine could be purchased at a cost of £100 000. ‘Wait for payment of that sum by the Government before proceeding to the first practical experiment on the 100 000 sheep.’

  Parkes intercepted the telegram as usual, and was outraged that Pasteur was asking for a sum for anthrax eradication that was four times the amount of the rabbit eradication prize. In the meantime, the Queensland government invited Loir and Germont to Brisbane to produce the pleuro-pneumonia microbe and make cultures for injecting livestock. A four-man Pleuro-Pneumonia Commission was set up in Queensland on 16 November. The young Henry Lawson in New South Wales also encountered pleuro-pneumonia in cattle and ‘used to bleed them by cutting their tails and ears in the sickening heat—and was often sick over the job—and inoculate them with a big needle’. Soon there might be a less squalid and more effective means.

  Pasteur was now complaining to the British government and even the Prince of Wales, an acquaintance of his, about the interception of telegrams. A member of the Legislative Council and former Bulletin editor named William Traill had already attacked Parkes for the damage done to New South Wales in the international press.

  In 1889 Parkes, threatened with insolvency once more and under suspicion from his followers that he was not a true Free Trade man, was the victim of defections that enabled Sir George Dibbs to become premier again. Pasteur was delighted that Parkes was gone, and in hope of a big sale posted off to Australia further tubes of anthrax. Even as he did so, the preliminary report of the Commission on Rabbit Destruction was being written on the Pasteur scientists’ chicken-cholera scheme. It read, ‘The Commission cannot recommend that permission be given to disseminate broadcast throughout Australasia a disease which has not been shown to exist in these colonies.’

  When Loir left Australia in February 1892, he took with him 250 000 French francs from the sale of cultures, but not the prize money. Pasteur told a French journalist that his representatives had ‘clashed with the malevolent intentions of the Commission appointed by the Australian Government’. Parkes, yet again returned to government, engaged Loir’s services once more and brought him back to Australia in 1890. Loir had convinced Pasteur to let him go ahead with the anthrax vaccination scheme. Arthur Devlin, the Riverina pastoralist, was again a great customer of the vaccine. By the end of the year pastoralists had made the anthrax and the pleuro-pneumonia vaccine so popular that Loir was able to send back a further 700 000 francs to the Pasteur Institute. Loir was beginning to like the country as well, and the laconic landowners and lessees of the bush—and in any case he had the company of Sarah Bernhardt during her 1890 tour of Australia. The great actress both lunched, dined and, for some nights, stayed on Rodd Island. Sarah’s last Sunday in Australia was spent on Rodd Island.

  Loir, returned to France again, achieved his doctorate with a thesis entitled ‘Microbiology in Australia’. This document achieved great currency amongst scientists and was used by Pasteur to get even with the Commission on Rabbit Destruction. Loir, with his new wife, boarded the steamer Australien for Australia and New Caledonia. Arriving in Sydney in August 1892, he found that public opinion was starting to run in Pasteur’s favour. Abigail, the former mines minister, who Pasteur saw as having played games with his nephew, was now one of those bankers destroyed by the depression and had been sentenced to five years’ hard labour for issuing a false balance sheet.

  The powerful had been chastened by the great collapse and in this new and more genial atmosphere, Loir announced that he intended to stay in Australia permanently if he could get the right backing. The Sydney Morning
Herald supported the idea that Pasteur should be given the prize, and Premier Sir George Dibbs, being Parkes’ political enemy, was not unsympathetic. Loir was able in the meantime to go ahead with testing the vaccine of a student of Pasteur’s. Professor Saturnin Arloing’s black leg (anthrax) vaccine was designed to protect Australian cattle against an affliction endemic in Australia. But when Loir’s thesis, now translated into English, was published in excerpts in the Australian newspapers, many colonial scientists were enraged. It was, in particular, Pasteur’s own inserted commentary on colonial biological ignorance which created the most anger. Loir departed Australia for good in 1893 to run the Pasteur clinic in Tunis. Though he would never see the rabbit prize awarded, he would live until 1941, nine years shy of the introduction of the organism myxomatosis into Australia’s enduring rabbit population.

  IS ART POSSIBLE?

  Could the Australian harshness and otherness permit poetry, and could the light and strangeness permit painting? Henry Kendall, struggling with alcoholism, former shepherd, gold commissioner on the New South Wales South Coast, and finally a New South Wales inspector of forests, was a notable Australian lyric poet at the beginning of the 1860s. Indeed his 1869 book, Leaves from Australian Forests, derived from his penetration of the coastal bush on horseback throughout that period. Generations of children in schools learned his gentle, celebratory and subtly nationalist ‘Bell-birds’.

  Through breaks of the cedar and sycamore bowers

  Struggles the light that is love to the flowers;

  And, softer than slumber, and sweeter than singing,

  The notes of the bell-birds are running and ringing.

  Adam Lindsay Gordon, twenty-seven in 1860 and with only another ten years to live, was no tender philosopher-poet—he was a boxer, a mounted trooper, a horse breaker and an extraordinary horseman in all ways. He too had something wayward in his soul, and in that was characteristic of a number of well-bred Britons who brought their flaws to Australia, a place that was well designed to magnify them. A graduate of the Royal Military Academy, Gordon came to Adelaide in 1853, at first serving in the police and then becoming a horse breaker and steeplechase rider. In 1862 he married Margaret Bark, a girl of seventeen. His first poem, ‘The Feud’, was published in March 1865, at a time when he was a member of the South Australian House of Assembly. He gave that up to settle on land in Western Australia but returned to South Australia, impoverished, and lived in Mount Gambier in 1867. His poems showed his classical education even in their titles, such as ‘Finis Exoptatus’, ‘Quare Fatigasti?’ and ‘Exodus Parthenidae’.

  ‘I’ve had an interview with the banker,’ went his lament for broke squatters in ‘Exodus Parthenidae’,

  And I found him civil, and even kind;

  But the game’s up here, we must weigh the anchor,

  We’ve the surf before, and the rocks behind.

  Throughout this time he was publishing verse in the Australian and Bell’s Life in Victoria. He tried to run a livery stable at Ballarat, but again went broke. He had a bad riding accident in 1868—jumping fences and barriers in his enthusiasm for steeplechase training. His only child Annie died, and his wife left him. Yet for all this bitterness, Lindsay Gordon seemed a romantic figure. At Flemington he won three steeplechase races on one afternoon, two of them on his own horse.

  There were bookmakers, trainers, touts,

  Heavy swells and their jockeys light,

  The man that drinks and the man that shouts,

  Carrier pigeon and carrion kite.

  In March 1870 he fell badly in a steeplechase and suffered a head injury. The day before he shot himself on the beach at Brighton in June 1870 he published his Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes. To a reader of his best-known extended poem, ‘The Sick Stockrider’, it seems as if he had always expected to be destroyed by the bush.

  There was Hughes, who got in trouble through that business with the cards,

  It matters little what became of him;

  But a steer ripp’d up MacPherson in the Cooraminta yards,

  And Sullivan was drown’d at Sink-or-swim.

  And Mostyn—poor Frank Mostyn—died at last a fearful wreck,

  In ‘the horrors’, at the Upper Wandinong;

  And Carisbrooke, the rider, at the Horsefall broke his neck,

  Faith! the wonder was he saved his neck so long!

  Lindsay Gordon’s death from the head injury evoked extraordinary tributes from sources as diverse as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Governor of Victoria. Oscar Wilde said he was one of the finest poetic singers the English race had ever known. ‘A shining soul,’ said Kendall, ‘with syllables of fire who sang the first songs this land can claim to be its own.’ In 1934 his bust would be placed in Westminster Cathedral to represent Australian poetry. For Australians and many Britons his poem ‘Froth and Bubble’ took on the moral force Kipling’s ‘If’ would later exert.

  Life is mainly froth and bubble,

  Two things stand like stone,

  Kindness in another’s trouble,

  Courage in your own.

  Oscar Wilde, in reviewing an early Australian anthology, gave a withering judgment. He described Australian versifiers as ‘poets who lay under the shade of the gum-tree, gather wattle blossoms and buddawong and sarsaparilla for their loves, and wander through the glades of Mount Baw Baw, listening to the careless raptures of the mopoke’. Wilde did, however, have regard for Kendall and Lindsay Gordon.

  At the same time Adam Lindsay Gordon died, twenty-five-year-old immigrant Marcus Clarke was putting the last touches to the novel His Natural Life, which was first, in the style of the time, published in serial form and which raised the embarrassing questions of British brutality and convict endurance. In 1856 the journalist Frederick Sinnett, writing in the Journal of Australasia, said that it was not possible to write Australian novels because Australian life, scenery and settings were unsuitable for the purpose. Although time would prove him wrong, it was clear that many Australians, native-born and immigrant, felt the same. Immigrants and people who thought of the northern hemisphere as their true home sought their literature from that source. As they believed colonial policies coincided with that of Great Britain, so they believed should their taste in books. Thus the impact of Clarke’s Australian novel on liberal-minded colonists was enormous, and though its purpose was not necessarily nationalist, it was the sort of book which gave wings to the desire for the distinctness of the native-born Australians. Sadly, Clarke would not write a corpus of novels because he died in 1881 at the age of only thirty-five, after a career first with the Argus, then at the Melbourne Herald, and finally at the Age.

  Rolf Boldrewood (the pseudonym of Thomas A. Browne), author of Robbery Under Arms—which was first published in the Sydney Mail over late 1882 and early 1883—enhanced the image of the bushranger as ‘iron-barked within and without’ and thus thoroughly Australian, badly used and striking back with skill. As a struggling pastoralist himself—he had whimsically called his pastoral lease on the Eumeralla River Squattersea-sur-mer—perhaps Boldrewood’s novel was his extended daydream about getting even with banks and other forces of authority, even though he had been a gold commissioner and Gulgong magistrate. Until now heroes in novels published in magazines had been gentlemen Britons colonising Australia. The stylish rebel bushrangers of Boldrewood’s novel were emphatically Australian. The reality that the bushranger was often Irish was avoided for the sake of mainstream sympathy, and the central character was true-blue Briton hero Ben Marston.

  Between 1890 and 1905 Boldrewood would write a number of other novels, short-story collections. He also helped Louis Becke write and publish his famous South Sea ‘blackbirding’ stories involving the piratical Bully Hayes, with whom Becke had sailed. But Robbery Under Arms would earn Boldrewood/Browne an international reputation; on
their journeys to Australia Mark Twain and Rider Haggard would seek him out.

  Writing remained a particularly hard option for colonials and one not everyone understood. The reason for coming all this way was inevitably, and in the huge majority of cases, to acquire the wealth to justify the journey. In this atmosphere Kendall found it impossible to work full-time as a writer, and Henry Lawson, considered a prodigious success by Australian standards, earned only £700 pounds from writing in his first twelve years—far less than most labourers’ wages. In 1899 he would write, ‘My advice to any young Australian writer whose talents have been recognised would be to go steerage, stowaway, swim and seek London, Yankeeland, or Timbuktu.’ Failing that, he suggested, study anatomy and thus know where to shoot oneself dead accurately. From several editions of My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin would earn a mere £24. That seemed to prove the point.

  Painters, particularly painters from elsewhere on earth with an established reputation, brought a worldliness with them when they turned up for the Australian phase of their careers. Louis Buvelot (1814–88), born in Switzerland, served as the bridge between the colonial and the Heidelberg paintings of Tom Roberts and others. He was a painter of huge, exotic landscapes who arrived in Melbourne in 1865 at the age of fifty-one with a young female artist, Caroline-Julie Beguin. (The place of Australia and New Zealand as places for sexual new starts is a subject which might one day attract an historian.) Buvelot had taught at a Swiss art school near Bern after earlier spending eighteen years in Brazil, where his uncle owned a coffee plantation. He would paint Australian material for the next twenty years, concentrating on Australian light. There is a resemblance between Buvelot’s paintings and those of Conrad Martens (who had sailed as artist on the famous Beagle and whose landscapes concentrate on Sydney Harbour) and those of the Viennese landscapist Johann von Guerard, who would paint in Australia for sixteen years. The work of these three artists was commonly accused of stressing the similarities between Australia and Europe instead of facing up to the unique demands the Australian environment made on the European sensibility, the demands which Tom Roberts and his Heidelberg School camping companions are seen as addressing.