Great Australian Journeys

by Seal, Graham;

  The first incident to break the boredom was a fight. After almost three weeks of close living even minor irritations might produce a violent reaction, as Ally excitedly recorded in her diary:

  We had scarcely got thoroughly awake this morning before we had a pugilistic encounter between two of the male passengers in our cabin, they sit at the next table to us and are constantly quarrelling over their food. There are eight of them in one mess, all gentlemen with one exception, it appears to me they have been born grumbling. They take their turns, two together for a week to cook for all the lot, and today being the last day for two of them, they thought they would end in a forcible manner. They flew at each other like prize fighters but two other men quickly separated them, but they looked as though they would murder each other, they got a little calmed but I can assure you it caused great excitement on board.

  The weather grew even hotter as they entered the tropics and they were tormented by ‘a brown kind of insect, a terror to tidy English matrons and maidens’. By the end of October the oppressive heat had eased: they were well out of the tropics and headed for colder and stormier climes. But they soon might have missed the bugs and heat as a massive storm rocked the ship. Ally’s diary told the tale:

  We have offered up our prayers this morning to thank God for the safe deliverance we have had from (what had every appearance, and what we expected to be) a watery grave, since I left off writing last night we have had the greatest storm this ship ever encountered, about 10 o’clock last night, after most of the passengers had retired, Willie among the number (Papa, Mamma, Bert and I) were sat at one of the tables. The wind was screeching and howling through the rigging, there were three men steering at the wheel, all lashed to, the wind was something dreadful, we imagined and felt thankful that you were safe in your homes, away from all danger, and we were expecting every minute the ship would go down.

  Just as they were wondering how much longer the storm would last they heard a crash up on deck and the sea began pouring in on them: ‘We gave ourselves up for lost and the people rushed out of their cabins looking terrified. Ma sat quite calm, I looked at her and could see her lips moving, she was pale as death and so was Papa . . .’

  Fortunately it was only some deck housing that had been swept away, allowing the waves to penetrate below. The second-class cabins were drenched and had to be bailed out. More seriously the waves almost extinguished the boilers. As Ally put it:

  the water poured down in the engine house and almost put out the fires, indeed, steam has no use, only to keep the ship straight, the sea had struck her a little sideway, had it struck her broadside nothing but a miracle could have saved her, the force of the sea the time the crash happened was so strong it turned the engine backwards.

  Despite fears the ship had caught alight, they plowed on and around 11 p.m. the captain came to reassure them that the worst was over and they gave thanks.

  The remainder of the voyage was calm, albeit punctuated by the unmasking of a sneak thief among the first-class passengers; ‘the black sheep of the Northumberland’, as Ally described the named and shamed miscreant.

  Ally herself suffered an accidental fall when she missed her grip on a handrail. She gave her head ‘an awful thump which made [her] see stars in consequence.’ But she then had the pleasure of being spoiled by family and other passengers and recovered in plenty of time to anticipate the thrill of first seeing their destination.

  Approaching Cape Otway the captain gave the order to shorten sail and prepare the anchor. The sailors and the male passengers ‘did not require telling twice and I can assure you the passengers put a hand too, as they knew that looked well for soon casting anchor’. Ally wrote, ‘all we have to do is wait as patiently as we can, and in due time, we will rid the ship and crew of our company, but it is time to close and turn in and try to sleep’.

  When she woke the next morning her journey was over. The Northumberland passed through Port Phillip Heads on 14 November after 52 days at sea. Ally and her family were no longer in that peculiar limbo of ocean passages. Now they were landed immigrants with new lives to begin.

  THE MOST BEAUTIFUL LIES

  Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Missouri in 1835, but would eventually—after looking out for himself from the age of twelve—become the great American writer and humourist known as Mark Twain. His pen name derived from his days as a riverboat pilot where the cry ‘mark twain’ was the pilot’s call to indicate a depth of two fathoms beneath a boat. By the early 1890s, Twain had made and lost a couple of fortunes and was repairing his finances with a world speaking tour, which included Australia in 1895. When the great American man visited he left a flurry of witty remarks and quips in his wake. Many of them are as revealing and funny now as they were back then.

  On arriving in Sydney, Twain was interviewed by a local journalist and declared:

  my greatest efforts are directed towards doing the world with as little hard work as possible. I frankly admit that in regard to most things I am phenomenally lazy. I have travelled from the Rocky Mountains to Jerusalem in order to escape hard work, and I have come to Australia with the same idea.

  He praised the harbour as ‘superbly beautiful’:

  We entered and cast anchor, and in the morning went oh-ing and ah-ing in admiration up through the crooks and turns of the spacious and beautiful harbor—a harbor which is the darling of Sydney and the wonder of the world. It is not surprising that the people are proud of it, nor that they put their enthusiasm into eloquent words. A returning citizen asked me what I thought of it, and I testified with a cordiality which I judged would be up to the market rate. I said it was beautiful—superbly beautiful. Then by a natural impulse I gave God the praise. The citizen did not seem altogether satisfied. He said:

  ‘It is beautiful, of course it’s beautiful—the Harbor; but that isn’t all of it, it’s only half of it; Sydney’s the other half, and it takes both of them together to ring the supremacy-bell. God made the Harbor, and that’s all right; but Satan made Sydney.’

  Of course I made an apology; and asked him to convey it to his friend. He was right about Sydney being half of it. It would be beautiful without Sydney, but not above half as beautiful as it is now, with Sydney added.

  But when travelling by train across the New South Wales–Victoria border, Twain was stunned to discover that he and all the passengers needed to change trains due to the different gauge tracks in each colony. His much-quoted comment was, ‘Think of the paralysis of intellect that gave that idea birth.’

  He was happier in Melbourne, especially at the Melbourne Cup.

  The Melbourne Cup is the Australasian National Day. It would be difficult to overstate its importance. It overshadows all other holidays and specialized days of whatever sort in that congeries of colonies. Overshadows them? I might almost say it blots them out. Each of them gets attention, but not everybody’s; each of them evokes interest, but not everybody’s; each of them rouses enthusiasm, but not everybody’s; in each case a part of the attention, interest, and enthusiasm is a matter of habit and custom, and another part of it is official and perfunctory. Cup Day, and Cup Day only, commands an attention, an interest, and an enthusiasm which are universal—and spontaneous, not perfunctory. Cup Day is supreme—it has no rival. I can call to mind no specialized annual day, in any country, which can be named by that large name—Supreme. I can call to mind no specialized annual day, in any country, whose approach fires the whole land with a conflagration of conversation and preparation and anticipation and jubilation. No day save this one; but this one does it.

  With a writer’s ear for everyday speech, Twain gently sent up the Australian accent, reporting his hotel chambermaid’s morning greeting: ‘The tyble is set, and here is the piper [paper]; and if the lydy is ready I’ll tell the wyter to bring up the breakfast.’

  He was also fascinated by the expression ‘My word’, seemingly in vogue at the time: ‘the first time I heard an Australian say it, it was positive
ly thrilling,’ he wrote and suggested that Americans import it for their own use.

  In Adelaide, Twain was impressed by the many faiths and the numerous churches, temples and chapels.

  She has a population, as per the latest census, of only 320,000-odd, and yet her varieties of religion indicate the presence within her borders of samples of people from pretty nearly every part of the globe you can think of. Tabulated, these varieties of religion make a remarkable show. One would have to go far to find its match.

  Twain was moved to consult a table of statistics recording the adherents to the faiths professed in Adelaide, and arrived at a total of just over 320,000, including 1719 practitioners of ‘Other Religions’. There were:

  Agnostics, Atheists, Believers in Christ, Buddhists, Calvinists, Christadelphians, Christians, Christ’s Chapel, Christian Israelites, Christian Socialists, Church of God, Cosmopolitans, Deists, Evangelists, Exclusive Brethren, Free Church, Free Methodists, Freethinkers, Followers of Christ, Gospel Meetings, Greek Church, Infidels, Maronites, Memnonists, Moravians, Mormons, Naturalists, Orthodox, Others (indefinite), Pagans, Pantheists, Plymouth Brethren, Rationalists, Reformers, Secularists, Seventh-day Adventists, Shaker, Shintoists, Spiritualists, Theosophists, Town (City) Mission, Welsh Church, Huguenot, Hussite, Zoroastrians, Zwinglian.

  About 64 roads to the other world. You see how healthy the religious atmosphere is. Anything can live in it. Agnostics, Atheists, Freethinkers, Infidels, Mormons, Pagans, Indefinites they are all there. And all the big sects of the world can do more than merely live in it: they can spread flourish prosper. All except the Spiritualists and the Theosophists. That is the most curious feature of this curious table. What is the matter with the specter? Why do they puff him away? He is a welcome toy everywhere else in the world.

  Twain visited the goldfields of Victoria and in Ballarat thought the Eureka Stockade ‘the finest thing in Australasian history. It was a revolution—small in size; but great politically; it was a strike for liberty, a struggle for a principle, a stand against injustice and oppression’ and ‘another instance of a victory won by a lost battle’.

  And on Hobart he wrote:

  Hobart has a peculiarity—it is the neatest town that the sun shines on; and I incline to believe that it is also the cleanest. However that may be, its supremacy in neatness is not to be questioned. There cannot be another town in the world that has no shabby exteriors; no rickety gates and fences, no neglected houses crumbling to ruin, no crazy and unsightly sheds, no weed-grown front-yards of the poor, no back-yards littered with tin cans and old boots and empty bottles, no rubbish in the gutters, no clutter on the sidewalks, no outer-borders fraying out into dirty lanes and tin-patched huts. No, in Hobart all the aspects are tidy, and all a comfort to the eye; the modestest cottage looks combed and brushed, and has its vines, its flowers, its neat fence, its neat gate, its comely cat asleep on the window ledge.

  He concluded with a perceptive summary of the Australian experience:

  Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer, and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third place. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful of lies. And all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises, and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.

  Of course they did, Mark!

  SONS OF EMPIRE

  It was once the practice in many British families for the eldest son to inherit while sons born later (and all daughters) had to make their own way in the world. Although this custom preserved family wealth—as long as the first-born was not a wastrel—it condemned many younger sons of middle-class families, and a few penniless aristocrats (actual or assumed), to rove the roads of the empire, earning their keep as best they could. There was a well-worn trail from Britain through southern Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia along which these wanderers travelled by tramp steamers, train and foot, often working their passage through the world’s byways. Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem on this theme. He called these men ‘the lost legion’ of ‘gentleman rovers abroad’ and wrote of their wanderings in Sarawak, up the Fly River, along the Oil Coast and on the wallaby track with ‘the swag and the billy again’.

  Kipling also hymned the lost legion in some of his other poems. In ‘The Song of the Banjo’, written in 1894, he refers to the industrial troubles in Australia at the time:

  By the bitter road the Younger Son must tread,

  Ere he win to hearth and saddle of his own,

  ’Mid the riot of the shearers at the shed,

  In the silence of the herder’s hut alone . . .

  London was the pivot around which the adventurers revolved through the empire, including Australia. In another poem, an unnamed writer describes those who roamed the roads of empire before World War I in search of adventure, riches, love or fulfilment of some kind. The war called many back to fight for the empire from which they had previously wandered, their experiences and assumed character now being turned to a common good; a righteous fight ending in a likely death.

  The younger son he’s earned his bread in ways both hard and easy,

  From Parramatta to the Pole, from Yukon to Zambesi;

  For young blood is roving blood, and a far road’s best,

  And when you’re tired of roving there’ll be time enough to rest!

  And it’s ‘Hello’ and ‘How d’ye do?’ ‘Who’d have thought of meeting you?

  Thought you were in Turkestan, or China or Peru!’

  It’s a long trail in peace-time where the roving Britons stray,

  But in war-time, in war-time, it’s just across the way!

  He’s left the bronchos to be bust by who in thunder chooses;

  He’s left the pots to wash themselves in Canada’s cabooses;

  He’s left the mine and logging camp, the peavey, pick and plough,

  For young blood is fighting blood, and England needs him now.

  And it’s ‘Hello’ and ‘How d’ye do?’ ‘How’s the world been using you?

  What’s the news of Calgary, Quebec and Cariboo?’

  It’s a long trail in peace-time where the roving Britons stray,

  But in war-time, in war-time, it’s just across the way!

  He’s travelled far by many a trail; he’s rambled here and yonder,

  No road too rough for him to tread, no land too wide to wander,

  For young blood is roving blood, and the spring of life is best,

  And when all the fighting’s done, lad, there’ll be time enough to rest.

  And it’s good-bye, tried and true, here’s a long farewell to you

  (Rolling stone from Mexico, Shanghai, or Timbuctoo!)

  Young blood is roving blood, but the last sleep is best,

  When the fighting all is done, lad, and it’s time to rest!

  A large body of romance and fantasy was built up around the figure of the younger son. He featured in boys’ own adventures and ripping yarns set in many different countries. The reality though, as always, was rather different. Some did stop rolling, perhaps settling down in the Australian bush in the pearling industry or mining and a few ‘made their pile’, either by luck or good management, possibly with a faint air of nefariousness involved. But more often, the demands of a life lived almost perpetually on the road, moving from place to unsanitary place, working in unhealthy conditions and climates, and the consequences of drink, drugs and heedless sexual encounters meant that many more younger sons did not get too old.

  The intergenerational journeying of the younger sons of the empire mostly came to an end with World War I. But the idea and the image of the rough diamond wanderer lived on in popular culture, particularly through movies and boys’ annuals right in to the 1960s.

  THE GREAT WHITE FLEET

  In an early example of a ‘captain’s call’, in
1907 American President Teddy Roosevelt decided to send a large fleet of his battleships on a voyage around the world. On 16 December that year sixteen ships of the United States Atlantic Fleet steamed past the presidential yacht in Hampton Roads, Virginia, to begin a cruise that would last fourteen months.

  This tour of the gleaming white vessels with golden bows was to be a global statement of American naval power. They would dock at twenty ports on six continents in the first ever round-the-world trip by a fleet of steam-powered steel warships. The 14,000 sailors and marines aboard the ships would cover 70,000 kilometres by the time they returned home. In August 1908, the ‘Great White Fleet’, as it had come to be known, reached Australia.

  Newspapers kept the public informed of the fleet’s progress. In early August 1908, some 100,000 New Zealanders greeted the fleet at Auckland in a massive display of public and official interest. The Australian press was also flooded with adulatory stories. Well before the ships were due, the country was in a state of high excitement bordering on mass hysteria. As one newspaper screamed, ‘Everybody is talking fleet.’

  Sydney’s Catholic community planned to welcome the Americans with an illuminated southern cross at the top of St Mary’s Cathedral. On Thursday 20 August, when the fleet docked, the cathedral bells would ring. The remaining week of the visit would be a nonstop cavalcade of parades, choirs and concerts, as well as banquets, at which the toast would be to ‘Our allies, friends and brothers: the American nation’, which had been proposed by the Catholic archbishop of Sydney. Arrangements for mass and other Catholic observances were also made on a large scale.