by Judy Powell
Jim was a splitter who happily got lost in the detail.
Chapter 7
Mount Pleasant, 1951–54
Since adolescence Jim had known that he would inherit property in Bathurst, to the west of Sydney − not just the estate of Mount Pleasant, but a quarry and a house in ‘horrid Scottish Baronial of the late 70s’. The Mount was, he told Eve, an ugly folly and when he inherited he thought they should blow it up.1 In 1950 Jim and Eve drove up to Bathurst to visit his aunt and consider their future. Eve revelled in the countryside, delighted to leave Sydney behind, and as they drove through the townships of the Blue Mountains Jim told her stories of his childhood.
As sandstone gorges drew Eve’s gaze, Jim explained that the Stewarts were one of the oldest families in colonial New South Wales and part of the establishment. In 1825, fewer than forty years after the arrival of the First Fleet, a Scot, William Stewart, was briefly Lieutenant-Governor of the new colony; the following year Governor Darling granted him vast swathes of farming and grazing land around Bathurst. Popular myth had it that Stewart rejected the offer of land in the settlement of Sydney, instead asking for all the land visible from Mount Pleasant, the highest point near Bathurst. According to local legend Stewart was buried standing upright on Mount Pleasant, surveying the acres he was granted.2
William Stewart’s son James had extravagant tastes and a sad family history. After the deaths of his three young children at Strath, the homestead his father had built at Bathurst, he constructed a massive Scottish baronial mansion, The Mount, of granite reputedly quarried from the land where the building now stands. Family myth had it that the house was modelled on Sir Walter Scott’s shooting box in Scotland.3
Jim’s father, Albyn Athol (A.A.), was an engineer and businessman;4 as a second Stewart son he was not in the direct line of succession. A.A. was accident-prone. He spent three years at The Leys School in Cambridge, where he distinguished himself by a series of sporting accidents.5 He trained as a naval engineer and joined the Navy, but was thrown across the engine room during gun trials and damaged his hand. Invalided out, he joined the Merchant Navy and led an adventurous life that involved shooting hummingbirds with a blowpipe on the Amazon and narrowly escaping imprisonment by the Turks for shooting ducks on the Black Sea.6 On returning to Australia he developed a successful business career, with interests that ranged from sand and gravel to shipping and hospitality. He owned properties in the best parts of Sydney.
Florence Morris, Jim’s mother, was South African and said to be a descendant of the landscape painter Landseer.7 An only child herself, she married Albyn in a society wedding at The Mount in 1899. It was fourteen years before she gave birth to Jim on 3 July 1913.
A year before Eve’s birth, and on the other side of the world, Jim Stewart had entered the New South Wales equivalent of Hampshire gentry. Although his childhood began in Australia, his world would have been familiar to Eve. As children, both lived with affectionate but restrained parents for whom money was often a substitute for personal contact. Both were only children, self-contained and selfish, spoiled and solitary. But there were subtle and significant differences. Although Jim and Eve both came from wealthy and well-travelled families, a son was always more secure than a daughter, whose future relied on the circumstances of her father or husband. Where Eve learned to blend into the background, Jim wanted to be centre stage. He had the confidence and self-assurance to step onto it.
As an adult Jim liked to tell everyone that his mother had little interest in him and when asking friends if they had seen him around, added ‘if you do find him, whatever he’s doing, tell him not to!’8 Perhaps with good reason. As a child Jimmy was a short skinny boy with unruly ginger hair and a tendency to fidget. He was quick to laughter but equally quick to irritation. He loved to play tricks.
Eve had already heard some of the stories and smiled as she listened once more. When Jim was five the Stewarts lived in a house at Elizabeth Bay on Sydney Harbour, close to where A.A. moored his boat. One day Jim was sent into the garden to play while his mother entertained guests at a tea party. He pointed the garden hose through the drawing room window, turned it on, and kept the women penned in a corner for five minutes. According to Jim, his mother spanked him and his father gave him five shillings! Some years later he blacked out a section of the Sydney suburb of Parramatta by throwing an S-shaped length of fencing wire over one of the electric light wires.9 He spent a great deal of time with the next-door neighbours, always leaving his hat behind as an excuse to return. He was at his most charming and cherubic when about to commit one of his more dastardly deeds. But he was always forgiven. You couldn’t be angry with Jimmy for long—and didn’t he know it!10
In spite of his protestations, Jim was closer to his mother than he admitted. From the age of six he lived with her in the village of Wentworth Falls, a place he remembered with great fondness. Straddling the road from Sydney to Bathurst, Wentworth Falls is one of a string of small communities in the Blue Mountains, a temperate retreat for the well-to-do from the urban crush of a sweltering Sydney summer. Jim’s mother owned a house there, Lymdale. Jim’s father took only limited interest in his wife. She was independently wealthy and they seldom lived together. In the 1920s many of the locals assumed that the Stewarts were ‘covertly separated’.11 Beside his business interests, A.A. developed a passion for collecting. Model-building was popular in the 1920s and 1930s: in Sydney alone there were four hundred members of model-building societies. As an engineer, A.A. had a particular interest in models of stationary engines, of the type used to power various industrial processes.
At Lymdale A.A. gave full rein to the fascination with engineering models that developed into something of an obsession and as a wealthy businessman he could indulge this obsession. He joined the miniature model group and progressively acquired a collection that rivalled any in the world.12 Although ostensibly bought as toys for his son, he only ever gave them to Jim for a short time before taking them back. He bought land adjoining Lymdale and built a complicated railway system for model trains, some of which had carriages large enough to carry six passengers. He added a western extension to the house for displaying static models and in the ‘garden’ constructed a specially designed tank for testing model boats. His father had a genius for improvising and ‘making do’, Jim told Eve as they drove past Wentworth Falls, adding that ‘only a practical engineer like my father could have made such a horrid series of additions to a house’.13 Eve smiled and thought of her own father’s obsession with building.
During the 1930s A.A. was a member of the Technological Advisory Board of the museum attached to the Sydney Technical College. For years, regular discussions of the board stressed the need for a specialised museum of technology of a type then fashionable throughout the British Empire. A.A. was an active board member and suggested approaching the government to take over the Queen Victoria Market building in the centre of Sydney. He personally lobbied the Premier of New South Wales.14
At the same time that he was a member of the board of the museum, he began selling his personal collection of models to the museum, seemingly blind to any conflict of interest. Although he donated five models, the remainder were sold and today form an important part of the collection of the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Jim absorbed his father’s passion for collecting. As a child he loved to lie on the grass, reading about coins and the stories they whispered of the distant past. But it was one thing to read the stories. Far better to own the coins themselves. Jim took Roman coins to bed instead of teddy bears, holding their history in the palm of his hand. This acquisitiveness was never to leave him.
In the 1920s the sea voyage from Australia to England took several months. Ships travelling at a leisurely pace took extended shore visits at Bombay, Aden and Port Said. Porters struggled with large cabin trunks and passengers dressed for dinner. Much of Jim’s early childhood was spent moving between Europe and Australia with his mother or father. Years later, in letters to fri
ends, he fondly recalls places they visited and hotels where they stayed. They wintered on the continent and took summer holidays in Ireland, Scotland or Scandinavia. His formal education was disjointed—no record exists of school attendance until the age of ten. He attended two schools in England and one in Australia between the ages of ten and fourteen,15 but schooling was only the formal part of a broader education he obtained as he travelled across the world in style. By his late teens Jim was familiar with much of Europe. It is doubtful he had much idea of how ordinary people lived.
From 1927 to 1930 Jim attended The Kings School at Parramatta in Sydney, the oldest independent school in Australia and a school that remains one of the country’s most expensive private schools for boys. It has a long tradition of sports and military cadets and the school magazine devotes considerable space to both. As is the way with school magazines, they also include student poems and essays, along with regular contributions from old boys. These paint a picture of the sort of life Jim was living, the life of the well-travelled wealthy upper classes. Articles provide regular glimpses of this life: ‘When last in Cairo’, ‘While travelling by ship in Norway’, ‘I make my debut at Balliol’ and ‘Life in Paris’. To many of the boys and most of the masters, England, rather than Australia, was ‘home’.
Each year he was at The Kings School, Jim wrote for the school magazine: two travel articles and one book review. The pieces are well written and largely free of purple prose, although the odd ‘smote’ and ‘affrighted’ slips in, as they do when you are young and mimicking your masters.16 ‘A Trip through the Southern Highlands’ describes travelling by road, presumably with his mother, to Edinburgh. At Loch Lomond ‘the day was still and broken only by the voices of the woods [but] … soon the van of the picnic brigade hove in sight, and with their arrival the prospect was not so pleasing’.
The next year Jim described his first visit, aged thirteen, to Rome the ‘eternal city’. Anticipation of the visit was somewhat dampened on first impressions: ‘It is hot and dusty in the summer, and crowded with an apparently aimless wandering mob, in which every twentieth man seem to be an official … The civilian population is motley and noisy.’ Finding the tourist pace of the Cook’s guide too fast, he and his mother returned to the Vatican (‘interesting to the student of art’), the Forum (‘a hopeless tangle to the uninitiated’, which ‘appealed to me more’) and the Catacombs, which he found the most fascinating. At thirteen it is not surprising that he was transfixed by the gruesome skeletons and phials of ‘red coloured liquid’. Their visit also took in Frascati (‘a sleepy little village, chiefly known for its wines and beautiful scenery’, which ‘plays the same role as the Blue Mountains towns in New South Wales as a week-end resort’) and Ostia (‘the ‘Manly’ of Rome’). They ended their visit, as all good tourists must, by throwing money into the Trevi Fountain to ensure their return and to follow tradition, ‘a tradition that the fountain cleaners are only too ready to perpetuate’.17
School life was not all work. In his first year, Jim had success on the running field (third in the 100 yards, but first in the 440) and was a successful third witch in the performance of Macbeth performed to raise money for the Parramatta Hospital Fund. Together with the two senior witches, they were, according to the review in the school magazine, ‘in action, in voice, and in every respect … witches realistic enough to give every one nightmare [sic].’18
Jim and Eve drove past Wentworth Falls and Katoomba and west to the central Bathurst plain. The trees, bent low against the wind, resembled the drooping pines in the Troodos Mountains and in the centre of the town of Bathurst Eve observed more parallels. A memorial to the Boer War had been dedicated by Lord Kitchener, whose map of Cyprus remains one of the great legacies of the English occupation of that island. Eve told Jim how much her father enjoyed poring over his copy as he decided which property to buy next; together they wondered if they would ever own their own place on Cyprus.
Bathurst is an old settlement, the first major city along the Great Western Highway, which leads westward from Sydney into the New South Wales outback. When the first English settlers sailed into Sydney Cove in 1788 they clung to the coast, a convict settlement run by a maritime force that relied on the sea for supplies. Although they explored areas along the coast to the north and to the south, travelling inland was impossible because of the impenetrable semi-circle of sandstone that surrounded Sydney, the Blue Mountains. With few horses and no bush knowledge, the tiny convict settlement on Sydney Harbour hovered at the edges of a land they knew little of and had not even begun to understand. When three European explorers found a path through the Blue Mountains in 1814, they came to a high country of rolling plains and deep alluvial soils. When Governor Macquarie visited the settlement a year later the town of Bathurst was proclaimed.
Today Bathurst sits in a pastoral landscape of rolling paddocks and sheep grazing in geometric willow-edged fields. It is a low landscape, open to a vast sky, a landscape of muted colours and rounded, gentle shapes—clouds billowing and rolling above meadows of closely cropped grass. Winters are bitter. Little breaks the wind as sheep huddle against fences close to the ground. Lambs die easily in these winters and the trees lean away from the winds that return each year.
Jim and Eve stopped at Strath to visit Aunt Roslyn, and after lunch walked across the rough road and open fields to inspect The Mount. Jim’s uncle Athol had abandoned the house in 1927, leaving it vacant after selling the furniture. From time to time people squatted in different parts of the building, but for many years it was completely deserted. During the Second World War Athol made the house and thirty acres of land available to the Women’s Land Army and these young women were the only people who had lived in the house in recent years.19 The two storeys were of dark granite blocks. Even darker slate roofing sagged and gaped. One upstairs room opened onto a verandah with a stone balustrade and a tall turret sprouting from the roof above the main entrance. Hand in hand they walked past the granite gateposts, each topped with a sandstone folly. Weeds smothered the downstairs verandahs. Eve thought it looked like a neglected Bisterne.
Jim and Eve stepped onto the front verandah and glanced back over the sheep paddocks sloping towards the willow-fringed Macquarie River. Clusters of cream-coloured roses competed with rampant honeysuckle. Zinnias and Michaelmas daisies grew below the balustrade alongside straggly tomatoes, presumably self-sown. They walked through the front door into the entrance hall and the atmosphere lightened. Jim pointed out the William Morris wallpaper to Eve and she was surprised it had survived so many years of neglect. Through the entrance hall they discovered what looked like a drawing room, separated from a similar room mirrored on the other side of the archway. In their imagination they lined the room, from floor to ceiling, with bookshelves and special cabinets for coins.
A cedar stairway led from the central area to a storey above and on to an attic, but the rickety stairs looked precarious. Rooms clustered around the inner stairwell—Jim explained that there were fifty in all. One with a series of tall windows topped with smaller windows of decorative leadlight, opened onto a stone balcony overlooking sheep paddocks. In another was a marble fireplace. A rusting iron bedstead was a reminder of the Land Army’s occupation. Downstairs they explored the ballroom at the back of the house. It was enormous, with immensely high ceilings. Could this solve their problems? They mentally furnished it with trestle tables and workbenches and peopled it with students mending pottery and drawing. A side verandah overlooked what must once have been a formal garden but the stone fountain stood desolate, abandoned amongst the weeds. In the kitchen and basement they found a defunct dumb waiter and cool storerooms. A water pump outside the kitchen sat over a well and behind it what looked like a bakehouse.
How would they possibly furnish the place? What would it cost to connect electricity? How would they manage with only one bathroom? Surely those marvellous marble fireplaces would be inefficient. How would they fund it? Jim made a mental list of nece
ssary improvements, while Eve planned her garden. Could they have poultry? Of course they would want cats, but what about a dog? If they had children there would be acres of countryside to roam. ‘How cold does it get in Bathurst?’ Eve asked.
One look between them sealed its fate. They decided they must have The Mount.
By early 1951 letters to Eve Dray were addressed to The Mount and some time later Jim wrote to their friend Judith Stylianou:
We are nearly straight at long last and are now settled in the country about 130 miles from Sydney. I go down to lecture every second week and spend the rest of my time up here. We have all our technical work and our store-rooms in the country and only use Sydney as a shop window for the finest objects or those that we need for teaching purposes. At long last I have got all my books together in one spot and we are really quite comfortable, with excellent working conditions … As I obviously have not written to you for so long, I expect that I forgot to tell you that Eve and I got married at the beginning of the year.20
Jim’s father and Aunt Roslyn attended the wedding ceremony, along with the two witnesses: Ron Byatt, a friend from the Numismatic Society, and Margery Dray, who flew to Australia for her daughter’s wedding and stayed on for six months at The Mount. For the sake of form, Eve’s address was given as Jim’s cousin’s place. It was a quiet affair. Eleanor, too, would remarry that year.