Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  Ridge’s radical personal decisions paralleled her mother’s, she who left her husband in Ireland to sail for Australia with their child. But Ridge must have also found inspiration as well in the unconventional mores of the bohemian artists of Australia. Julian Ashton wrestled too with the problems of convention. His wife, one of the founders of the Womanhood Suffrage League, spoke out publicly against marriage before her death in 1900, and recommended an annual review of the marriage contract. In 1901 just after A.G. Stephens published Louise Mack’s book of poetry, Mack abandoned her husband of five years to work in Europe.

  A few months after Ridge sailed away, Peter Webster was hauled into the magistrate’s court in Hokitika on a charge of assault—for spitting in the face of one John Roberts. Such was the rough-and-ready life in the mining town. Six witnesses were called. They testified that Roberts said “Thank you” after being spat upon, but the judge found Webster guilty and fined him eight pounds. By May of that year he had their seven-room house auctioned off, a clear indication that it wasn’t for lack of income she had left him, and a signal that Webster knew she was not returning. There is no record of him pursuing his wife and child to Australia. He died in 1946, just three miles south of Kanieri Forks in Rimu, the tiny town where his parents lived and died. No second wife, no other children—he never saw his son again—but fifty nephews and nieces survived him, as he was one of thirteen siblings. The Webster family remembers Ridge as “a rather wicked figure.”

  Chapter 5

  Beyond Sydney

  (Air

  heavy and massed and blue

  as the vapor of opium…

  domes

  fired in sulphurous mist…

  sea

  quiescent as a gray seal…

  and the emerging sun

  spurting up gold

  over Sydney, smoke-pale, rising out of the bay…) (Sun-up 43)

  “Where shall I pour my dream?” is the last line of “The Dream” quoted above. The poem invokes her dilemma of whether to remain in Australia this second time, or cut all ties and move to America. Fellow poet Henry Lawson traveled between New Zealand and Australia three times before he got up the nerve to find a patron to send him to England. On his return to Australia, he wrote in an 1892 Bulletin:

  Talent goes for little here. To be aided, to be known,

  You must fly to Northern cities who are juster than our own.

  Oh! the critics of your country will be very proud of you,

  When you’re recognised in London by an editor or two.

  You may write above the standard, but your work is seldom seen

  Till it’s noticed and reprinted in an English magazine.

  At the time, Ridge was perhaps the most successful poet coming out of Australia to excel internationally. Australian women were thought to be particularly competitive. The 1888 poem “The Australian Girl” by Ethel Castilla describes the species: “Her frank, clear eyes bespeak a mind/Old-world traditions fail to bind./She is not shy/or bold, but simply self-possessed.” Women who remained in Australia, however, suffered the same struggles to write and be recognized at home as their New Zealand counterparts. “I was not born a parasite,” declares Sybylla, the heroine of the bestseller My Brilliant Career (1901) written by Miles Franklin, who left Australia for America a year before Ridge. Sybylla refuses to be “one of the blood-suckers who loll on velvet and satin, crushed from the proceeds of human sweat and blood and souls.” Instead she insists on acknowledgement as a writer, but is ambivalent about the outcome. “Ah, thou cruel fiend—Ambition! Desire!” she cries, after refusing an offer of marriage. “Why do I write?” she asks. “I am only an unnecessary, little, bush commoner. I am only a—woman.” The novel ends without hope that she will have the “brilliant career” she so wants.

  In 1906, Ridge was 32 years old, living with her mother and son, now six. Their address is just an eight-minute walk from her cousin Eddie’s house at 69 Alexander Street in North Sydney. The neighborhood, known as “Crows Nest” for the promontory that once bore the residence of Mary Wollstonecraft’s cousin, was then full of boarding houses, shanties, and several mansions, including one that housed a future premier, and one that offered a view that remains the most photographed panorama of the city. It was also home to writers and artists like Norman Lindsay, who was then working at the Bulletin with A.G. Stephens, and the Van Dyke-bearded Rubbo, who reportedly fought Sydney’s last duel. Henry Lawson kept a room in the neighborhood at Isabella Byer’s Coffee Palace and his daughter went to high school three blocks from Ridge’s address. While Lawson was publishing his stories and poems in the Bulletin, Ridge’s work appeared some thirty times. As Stephens’s or Ashton’s protégé, she would have frequented the Sydney events and been introduced to everyone. “Everybody was brighter [t]here than anywhere else,” writes novelist Louise Mack. “People talked more brilliantly, laughed more naturally, and found themselves of more importance.” The new subjects discussed were gender, race, and nationalism, and the various isms in art. The salons were also where the bohemians learned to preen and attract financial patronage, a talent key to Ridge’s later survival. Although women attended these salons, they were rarely invited to the bohemian clubs. They could, however, now go with men to the pubs to extend their salon talk, to “Beerhemia” as coined by Lawson, whose alcoholism and bohemianism eventually killed him.

  Lawson memorialized the North Sydney neighborhood with many sharply political poems that depicted the thriving but quickly changing community at the turn of the century.

  The old horse ferry is a democratic boat,

  For she mixes up the classes more than any craft afloat;

  And the cart of Bill the Bottlo, and the sulky of his boss,

  Might stand each side the motor car of Mrs Buster-Cross…

  The radical freethinker William Chidley also lived in the neighborhood and used its “Speakers Corner” to deliver speeches about sex while wearing a toga. While he was no Australian Walt Whitman, his presence suggested a freethinking, open society that would also tolerate and perhaps encourage a single mother with aspirations to become an artist or a poet. She would certainly not have been regarded as a “wowser,” Australian slang for the prim temperance women of the time who were thought to want to take all the fun out of life. Another freethinker in the neighborhood was Lawson’s former girlfriend and Bulletin poet Mary Gilmore (1865-1962). After her relationship with Lawson, Gilmore traveled to Paraguay in 1896 to establish a socialist community but soon returned. Her later writing pioneered the view of the Aborigines as victims of injustice and discrimination. (In contrast, some of Ridge’s early work mirrored Australasian prejudice against the Chinese). Gilmore was eventually accorded a state funeral, a postage stamp, and her face on the $10 bill inscribed with two lines of her poetry: “Our women shall walk in honour/Our children shall know no chain.”

  Melbourne-based Lesbia Harford (1891-1927) would be Ridge’s closest Australian counterpart in poetry and politics. Contemporary poet Les Murray claims that Harford is “one of the two finest female poets so far seen in Australia,” and she is deemed “a poetic sister of sorts to John Shaw Neilson,” the lyric poet whose work is bound with Ridge’s in the Mitchell Library. Of Irish descent, Harford even looked a bit like Ridge, with her hair pulled back in a similar style. Harford’s early years may have influenced her turn to radicalism: her father went bankrupt and abandoned her and her siblings for the gold mines in Western Australia. Harford was one of the first women to graduate with a law degree from the University of Melbourne, but instead of practicing, she joined the Wobblies, organized in clothing factories, fought against conscription, and worked as a servant, despite ill health. An advocate of free love, she had affairs with both sexes, including Guido Barrachi, one of the founders of the Australian Communist party. She wrote imagist poems, skipping the bush ballad tradition that Ridge began with, her brother having introduced her to cubism and vorticism. She felt that “poetry and fiction should not b
e consciously propagandised” and published little. Perhaps in response to the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in 1915, she wrote:

  I will not rush with great wings gloriously

  Against the sky

  While poor men sit in holes, unbeautiful,

  Unsouled, and die.

  Harford herself died in 1927 at the age of 36 of a weak heart, leaving behind three thick exercise books of her work, and the draft of a novel.

  After A.G. Stephens returned to Australia, he opened a bookstore in 1906 in order to recoup losses from his magazine, but it failed a year later. There were no other presses in Australia as interesting as Stephens’s. The few that paid promulgated that women were merely the “breeders” for the newly federated “white” Australia. That alone might have persuaded Ridge to move on. But she was very fond of Sydney. “Beloved city, city I love,” she writes at the very end of her life. It must have been hard to leave.

  While Ridge was mulling over her prospects, her stepfather died of pneumonia in the Hokitika insane asylum, and was buried January 16, 1906. She did not return for the funeral. A year and a half later, her mother died of acute gastroenteritis and cardiac failure in Sydney’s Ellis Coffee Palace. She was planning to travel with Ridge and her grandson Keith to San Francisco. Were mother and daughter just downing a quick cup of coffee while shopping for their voyage, scheduled only a month away? The area was the center of Sydney working class shopping, where all the electric trams stopped, and there’s still a coffee bar today at that address at street level. Australian turn-of-the-century “coffee palaces” also provided rooms, and were considered more respectable than other lodgings because they didn’t serve liquor. Ridge and her mother might have been living there.

  The informant on the August 5, 1907 death certificate is Ridge’s cousin Alfred. For the last three years he had been alderman in the district of Canterbury, a citizen of some standing. Was it customary to spare a woman the task of identifying the body, or was Ridge already on her way to Brisbane to buy her ticket and catch her boat? She wasn’t there to correct Alfred when he misidentified Emma’s father and put “tutor” in place of “customs officer” as his position. Ridge is listed on her mother’s death certificate as “Rosa Webster.”

  Imagine Peter Webster showing up at her relatives’ doorstep weeks or months later, demanding to know where his wife and child had gone. Did the aunt or her cousins feign ignorance—Bugger off you bastard—or were they too kept in the dark and did they try to console him? Perhaps Webster was too demoralized to search for her. “Nil” is what Ridge put down for the names and address of nearest kin on her departure. On the manifest she identified herself as Sybill Robson, perhaps after Miles Franklin’s heroine, Sybylla, “a fiercely independent girl who is rebelling at the limits imposed by circumstance on her life.” While she and Keith could have sailed directly from Sydney to San Francisco, instead they traveled to Brisbane, some 450 miles away, where they waited for nearly a month before sailing to San Francisco via Melbourne. In a final bit of subterfuge, Ridge—now Mrs. Robson—gave Keith, described on the manifest as fair, with brown hair and blue eyes, the name Eric. On September 4, 1907 mother and son set sail on the Moana for America.

  Chapter 6

  Last Links with Australasia

  The brochure called the Moana “a palatial liner.” The 350 foot-long vessel was a ten-year-old mail steamship, and the largest of the Union Company’s fleet. Decorated with Brussels carpet runners and sofas upholstered in blue moquette, the ship was equipped with a stage for amateur theatricals, a music saloon paneled in sycamore, 500 incandescent lamps, five electric fans “so convenient for travel in the tropics,” 11 tons of refrigerated food, and last but not least, a special dining room for children.

  “They who travel from Australia are the moneymakers,” writes Louise Mack about her voyage to Europe in 1901, “[they are] the business people, the butchers, bakers and iron-mongers, people who don’t waste time looking at the unseen but convert the visible into gold or silver as quickly as possible.” Ridge was not among the moneymakers. “Remember I came steerage to America in an Australian boat,” she writes in 1932. “It was not bad at all.” Then she immediately contradicts herself: “though 23 years ago [it] was a ghastly nightmare beyond belief.”

  Ridge must have been full of grief at the loss of a mother so beloved. But she must also have been thrilled to be leaving the Antipodes at last, joining her fellow passengers in planning their conquest of a new world. She was, however, traveling with her small son, without the advantages of the “special dining room for children.” In New Zealand and Australia she had her mother, and in Australia she also had the possibility of her aunt or cousins to help look after him, and he had cousins to play with in both countries. On the boat, there was only the hope of meeting playmates—and she might have been reluctant to befriend anyone in her role as a fugitive.

  Their first stop was Suva for a day’s refueling and perhaps taking on sugar for a Vancouver/Fijian firm, since the boat would dock in Vancouver. A shipping brochure of the period extols the native populace that collected on the Suva wharf upon the arrival of a steamship:

  the ever-smiling face of the little thick-set Fijian with the carriage of a born soldier, the slender Oriental swathed in picturesque cotton garments, brightly turbaned, his womenfolk, lithe and childlike, decked with bracelets, anklets, noselets, earrings, and a wreath of bright-colored necklaces, following behind…

  How would a New Zealander view the Fijians—like the Maori, a dying race? Despite a superior racial attitude, the Edwardians had little better technology than the Fijians. Clothing was still washed by hand, mangle or no mangle, and their cooking stoves burned wood. She may have seen an exhibition of fire walking—still prime tourist entertainment today—but dressed in layers and layers of cotton and wool that were popular with colonials even in that climate. Surely the Fijians thought the Edwardians crazy.

  The Moana also docked in Honolulu for at least a day. The only hotel on Waikiki beach was also known as The Moana, which means “the sea” in Hawaiian. Built by U.S. investors immediately after the overthrow of the Hawaiian government nine years earlier, the hotel was one of the more obvious outcomes of the political maneuverings of American businessmen. It featured 75 guest rooms with telephones, bathrooms, and an electric elevator. The port at its feet was always crowded with boats steaming between one continent and the next, commerce just beginning to replace the native Aloha. Jack London, the popular novelist and committed socialist whom Ridge would meet in a few years, spent the year before surfing on a nearby beach. He describes the view: “We could see the masts and funnels of the shipping in the harbor, the hotels and bathers along the beach at Waikiki, the smoke rising from the dwelling-houses high up on the volcanic slopes of the Punch Bowl and Tantalus.” Between the beach and the jagged volcanic peaks flourished large taro beds beside the earliest buildings of the University of Hawaii. Electric trolleys ran nearby.

  Ridge and her son Keith must have walked the Moana’s gangplank to stroll along the pier where the Chinese worked as longshoreman. They would have been familiar since Ridge included a Chinese fruitseller in a poem she wrote later about her childhood in Australia, and there was a Chinese man in one of her earlier stories. The tattoos on the Hawaiians, their general demeanor, and the sound of their language must have reminded her of the Maori, a culture she knew well enough to draw an elaborate Maori fish trap as an illustration for the end of her story, “The Trial of Ruth,” and cite references to their mythology in a number of early poems. A patois had evolved on the Hawaiian docks between Maori in its many varieties: Cockney-English, the Marquesan, Hawaiian of course, as well as Portuguese, Chinese, Fijian and various kinds of American, San Francisco to New England—rich cacophony for a poet from anywhere. Perhaps Keith found a playmate or two and they ran along the sand, scaring up the gulls and throwing sticks in the water, relieved to be off the boat for a few hours. But he couldn’t run entirely free—he had to remember
he was Eric Robson—Eric, she must have called out to him. Or did he cry to go back on the boat, sensitive to the hot sun and the sand?

  Why didn’t Ridge leave him with his grandparents? In their Cyclopedia photo, James Webster is bewhiskered and balding but not unkind-looking, and Margaret, with a friendly smile and bright eyes, holds a small book open as if she had just read it aloud. By 1907 James had retired from the pub and worked as a government valuator. Most of their thirteen grown children had children who lived in the area—surely they would have welcomed Keith. But Ridge’s mother was the one who acted the doting grandmother, having accompanied them on both trips to Australia. Then she died.

  Ridge was fleeing a difficult history: childhood poverty, a dead baby, a bad marriage, an insane stepfather, a recently deceased mother. She must have given considerable thought to how to manage with her son by the time she reached Hawaii, halfway to San Francisco. On board her fellow passengers were remaking themselves, perhaps changing their names too, invoking new life stories. Edwardians were very mobile, and as immigrants they were making their way to America by the thousands.

  Wind rising in the alleys

  My spirit lifts in you like a banner

  streaming free of hot walls.

  You are full of unspent dreams….

  You are laden with beginnings….

  There is hope in you…not sweet…

  acrid as blood in the mouth.

  Come into my tossing dust

  Scattering the peace of old deaths,

  Wind rising in the alleys,

  Carrying stuff of flame. (Sun-up 93)

  Ridge’s boy Keith was her last link to her old life. He definitely inherited his father’s large ears. Although he was separated from his father the first time at age three, he could have inherited his mannerisms too, a walk like his or gestures. These would be daily reminders of her husband. The boy could have missed his father or his cousins in New Zealand or Australia and let Ridge know, the way children do, how unhappy he was without them. He might have wanted to go home. He must certainly have been bewildered by all the travel, true of many travelers no matter what age en route to a new country. He might have whined on the boat, or fallen ill and had to be nursed for days. Other children might have picked on him because he didn’t have a father. She may have realized on the boat that she couldn’t do for him as her mother had for her. Or had her mother already suggested that she was the flower to be treasured, not to squander her talents on her grandson?