Then it was time to leave for Melbourne. The company was worried about the reception they would receive in the southern city, for people said, ‘What went in Sydney was a dead frost in Melbourne.’ Most of the company made the trip by steamer but Soldene and three of her fellow performers decided to see something of the country and took the adventurous overland route on the Cobb & Co Royal Mail coach:
Such a journey, on a ‘Cobbs’ coach, drawn by six young horses, who galloped up mountains and flew down them, driven by coachmen more or less under the influence of the weather. One told us he had been out on a ‘burst to a wedding, not slept for three nights,’ but should be all right when he had a ‘nobbler’. We looked forward with much pleasurable anticipation to the ‘nobbler’, but were horrified when we saw it—‘half a tumbler of whiskey’. Our driver tossed it off. He had not overstated its merits. It pulled him together splendidly, not that it made any difference in his driving, which was dare-devil and perfect, as was that of all the other boys.
Fancy a track of soft sand, cut into deep ruts, piled high up in banks, winding in and out of trees, sharp corners, unexpected fallen trunks, monster upturned roots, every kind of obstacle, six horses always galloping, the coach banging, creaking, swaying from side to side!! Then suddenly down we go, down over a mountain as steep as the side of a house, down into and through a rushing and roaring, tumbling, bumping, yellow river!! Splash, dash. Then with a ‘Houp!’ ‘Hi!’ and a big lurch, out again and up the opposite side galloping always galloping, breathless; the driver shouting, cracking his whip, and the horses shaking the water from their side, tossing their heads, and jingling their harness; then out on to the level, soft and springy, covered with mossy turf and beautiful trees like an English park; away over more sand, and leaving the mossy turf, and plunging through sharp, cutting, stiff, rusty looking, tall grass, growing in huge tufts, far apart.
At last we come to a hut, full gallop, and the driver, without any preparation, pulls the horses up on their haunches . . . It was all lovely except for the jolting, and my hands were blistered with holding on. I liked to sit on the box, though it made one sick, not with fright exactly, but with excitement and the anticipation of some possible calamity.
No calamity befell them other than an unfavourable impression of Gundagai, then a gold mining town, which, ‘like every other mining town I have ever seen, was distinguished by a marvellous display of rubbish of all sorts, old boots, tin cans of every description, meat cans, old stays, old bonnets, old bats, old stockings, heaps of more cans, strewn for miles. It takes all the romance out of the scene.’
The intrepid entertainers survived the journey and need not have worried about their reception in Marvellous Melbourne. They opened at the Opera House and, as Soldene put it, ‘falsified our expectations by making a big success’.
Emily Soldene was a talented performer, able to sing in both serious and popular styles. She was successful enough to establish and manage her own company with considerable acumen. Her policy was to employ attractive ballet dancers for the chorus: ‘The result, a minimum of voice, perhaps, but certainly a maximum of good looks and grace . . . They felt the music, were full of life, and, like a blooded horse, were anxious for a start.’
Left a widow two years after her Australian tour and with four children to support, Soldene continued touring and performing. She returned to Australia in 1892 but the tour was a failure and she was forced to take up an offer to work as a journalist. For seventeen years she wrote a weekly column of London gossip for Australian newspapers. She also wrote a novel and a scandalous memoir naming names and delighting her readers. She died in 1912.
ACROSS THE BORDER
In the spring of 1881, a young man identified only as ‘a young Bendigoian’ left Victoria’s Mount Hope for Mount Browne in the arid ‘corner country’ of New South Wales. An experienced bushman, he travelled with another man, named only as Charley M, in a light wagon drawn by a pair of horses. Their journey was primarily to search for plant and insect specimens but also to survey for gold reefs, as the Albert goldfields, to which they were headed, were in the grip of gold fever.
Preparations for the journey were careful: ‘In packing up for a long journey into the bush, it is a good plan to get everything ready you intend to take and put them on the ground before you commence to pack up, then go carefully through them and turn out everything you can possibly do without, and it is wonderful what you can do without when you have not got it.’
The naturalists crossed the border between the colonies at Moama, where they had to satisfy the excise man that they were not carrying any items that would attract an intercolonial duty fee. They hid their half a gallon of best whiskey in a bag of oats and their tea—then a taxable item—in a bag of chaff.
The examination of our trap by the New South Wales excise man seemed a disappointment to him especially as he noticed we had both got a pair of brand new boots on, and none but old pairs on board. He took a second look into my Naturalist’s box, but as everything was marked with a death’s head and cross bones and branded ‘poison’ he merely remarked that he supposed I was going to collect bugs and beetles as well as nuggets. He brightened up a little when we told him we intended to buy our stores at Deniliquin as the New South Wales goods were generally better than the Victorian ones, and wished us good luck and a good journey.
Safely past the excise man, and now into New South Wales, the only thing they now had to fear was the supernatural.
From Moama to Deniliquin and thence to Hay is the ground, nearly as well trodden as Pall Mall and not much more feed on the road for horses or cattle. We camped one night at the ‘Boundary Gums’, near Hay. This is the place where the famous ‘trotting cob’, without a head, takes his midnight rounds to wake up the sleeping stockman if there are any strange horses in the station paddocks.
The travellers were assured that many had seen the apparition with their own eyes, but they did not. Their horses were still grazing happily in the squatter’s paddock despite the threat of the headless cob. As they went, they found ‘the price of stores rose very fast at each approaching township, and out of all proportion to the rates of carriage between the two places. Deniliquin was dearer than Echuca, and Hay much dearer than Deniliquin.’ The price of tea more than doubled between Hay and Wilcannia. Despite the prices, they pushed on, living partly off the land and collecting specimens.
From Hay to Booligal is one immense plain without a stick of firewood for over fifty miles, and salt-bush makes very inferior fuel; however, we did very well as we determined to take back tracks and go by way of Hilstone, both for the sake of feed and for the purpose of seeing the country. As there had been a heavy fall of rain round Cowl Cowl and Wulbar, the grass was very good but the roads heavy.
At Ballangerumble there was double disaster. The Bendigoian naturalist went out for a stroll:
It was rather late when I got back to camp and pretty dark by the time I had pinned out my specimens, and before I had finished Charley announced the fact that ‘tea was ready’, and brought me a pannican full to go on with and after asking me if I should like a bit of cold turkey for my supper, he said, ‘I say, I don’t think this tea tastes quite right, it’s very weak’. I said, ‘perhaps it wants some more sugar, Charley’. He therefore put some more in and after giving it a good stir, quietly said, ‘try your tea and tell us if there is anything the matter with it’. I therefore took a good drink as it was nice and cool, and did not perceive anything amiss until I got it down, but the flavour at once induced me to go and look into the billey, upon examining which I found a good handfull of my ‘longicorn beetles’ floating about in the hot tea mere bloated corpses of their former selves.
The naturalist had placed his dried beetles in a tin that looked very much like the tea box. Surviving beetle tea, they encountered various travellers along the way. On the main Wilcannia 70-mile track they ‘passed several parties bound for the diggings and a mixed assortment they were . . . One day we
passed a party consisting of two spring carts, four pack horses, two goats, a white cockatoo, two men and a boy; also two women both with babies, and the family carriage in the form of a perambulator tied to one of the spring carts and the whole party seemed as happy as sandboys.’
They moved on to the goldfields capital of Milperinka, now a ghost town, but then the main settlement of the region, if one with some postal problems:
From here to Cobham lake the country consists of sand flats and scrubby country; the lake is a beautiful sheet of water about a mile and a half long, with a beautiful sandy beach. Fifteen miles further brings us to One Tree, a waterhole two miles from Milperinka Creek by running up which we arrived at Milperinka town-ship, the capital of the Albert goldfields of New South Wales. This capital consists of eight buildings and two shanties, and is about the meanest township ever called by that name even in New South Wales. It is the seat of Government and a post town, but the postmaster not being in possession of a stamp to deface the postage stamps or to stamp the name of the township, etc., is obliged to write all these particulars on all letters that pass through his hands and to make a deliberate cross over her Gracious Majesty’s twopenny countenance at the corner of each letter.
Once again the travellers were shocked by the prices on the diggings which, they claimed, were maintained by a ring of Wilcannia storekeepers. Despite the prices, the diggings were thronged with people arriving hopefully or leaving in disappointment.
The gold field consists of three main rushes. First the ‘Four Mile’, eight miles from here; ‘Mount Browne’ four miles further on; and the ‘Granite’, 30 miles further still and close to the Queensland border. There have been some good patches of gold obtained at all these places, but for yields we are obliged to trust to what other people tell us, and I am sorry to say that liars even exist at Mount Browne.
The anonymous Bendigoian finished his traveller’s tale with a description of the relatively liberal regulations governing the diggings and noted that everyone was ‘dryblowing’, or obtaining gold by shaking a wooden cradle of earth and allowing the wind to blow the soil away to reveal any fleck of gold it might contain. We do not discover whether he tried his hand at fossicking but his account gives a first-hand view of the colourful and often improvised nature of colonial life and travel.
WAY OF THE CHARLATAN
In 1898 and 1899 a popular English travel magazine published a serialised account of one man’s journey through the south seas and into northern Australia. Louis de Rougemont’s story was a colourful one, involving shipwrecks, cannibalism and a host of daring adventures. According to de Rougemont he had lived among the Aborigines for 30 years, marrying into the ‘tribe’ and eventually becoming a chief. He saved two white women from a fate worse than death, and escaped attacks by the savage local fauna, hostile natives and Europeans. He even described flocks of flying wombats.
Despite absurdities like this, de Rougemont could also write plausibly about aspects of Aboriginal practice, as he does here about the message stick tradition:
I ought to mention that before leaving my black people I had provided myself with what I may term a native passport—a kind of Masonic mystic stick, inscribed with certain cabalistic characters. Every chief carried one of these sticks stuck through his nose; I, however, invariably carried the passport in my long, luxuriant hair, which I wore ‘bun’ fashion, held in a net of opossum hair. This passport stick proved invaluable as a means of putting me on good terms with the different tribes we encountered. The chiefs of the blacks never ventured out of their own country without one of these mysterious sticks, and I am sure I should not have been able to travel far without mine. Whenever I encountered a strange tribe along the line of march I always asked to be taken before the chief, and when in his presence I presented my little stick. He would at once manifest the greatest friendliness, and would offer us food and drink. Then, before I took my departure he also would inscribe his sign upon it, handing it back to me, and probably sending me on to another tribe with an escort. It often happened, however, that I was personally introduced to another tribe whose ‘frontier’ joined that of my late hosts, and in such cases my passport was unnecessary.
Improbable though most of these yarns were, they made an immediate impression on the reading public and were widely reprinted. Eminent scientific authorities were quoted in support of de Rougemont and he was even invited to lecture to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Bristol before professional anthropologists and geographers. But it was his story of riding on the back of a turtle that led to his exposure as a hoaxer.
Sceptical journalists at London’s Daily Chronicle invited de Rougemont in for a chat. They made sure to include a barrister in the group who plied him with awkward questions to which he was unable to provide satisfactory answers. Eventually, the Australian journalist M.H. Donohoe wrote a detailed exposé of de Rougemont’s fantasy.
The true story was that Louis de Rougemont was in fact a Swiss–Austrian named Henri Louis Grien (or Grin, sometimes Green). While originally from a farming background, as a young man Grien had worked as a courier for a well-known actress of the era and then travelled to Australia in 1875 as a butler to the Western Australian governor. He then drifted round the country working in the pearling trade, and as a cook, a waiter and a photographer, before finally becoming involved with mining syndicates. He married in 1882, leaving seven children with his wife when he deserted her sixteen years later. He floated across to New Zealand, where he set up as a spiritualist and eventually worked for his passage to London, arriving in March 1898.
While Grien had certainly travelled to and through Australia, the bulk of what he passed off as his own experiences were those of Harry Stockdale, an artist and explorer with extensive bush experience. Stockdale had headed an expedition to the north-west in 1884–85 and kept a detailed journal of the expedition (see chapter 2). Grien seems to have known Stockdale and by some unexplained means also came into possession of the journal, which he used as a basis for his confection. Stockdale’s mention of ‘flying possums’, presumably Eurogliders, became de Rougemont’s flying wombats.
De Rougemont also made clever use of other known facts that gave his work an air of credibility. When the explorer Ernest Giles attempted to cross the continent from east to west in 1873–74 he reluctantly included an enthusiastic young man named Gibson in his party. Gibson disappeared in the course of the expedition (see ‘Naming the Desert’). De Rougemont claimed to have stumbled across him out in the desert, raving and lost. The story went that Gibson lived with de Rougemont and his Aboriginal wife for two years, recovering his mind only shortly before he died.
After the hoax was exposed, Henry Lawson wrote a characteristically tongue-in-cheek appreciation of de Rougemont:
Now, that it is all over and forgotten, I cannot, for the life of me, see where was the sense or need in the howl that was raised against de Rougemont whose descriptions or pen pictures of savage life and scene in remote and unknown territory of remote and hitherto unknown Australia are the most romantic, interesting and perhaps the most reliable of any writing, in connection with Australia, published by an English magazine up to date. What, in this connection, had Australia to get mad about?
I must admit that I felt just as wild as any of de Rougemont’s critics at the first go off; but that was mainly because he got there with his scenery and savages before I did with mine. He crowed low and roosted high until the glorious opportunity came; then he seized it. And he made a bigger splash in three months than any other Australian writer has begun to make in a hundred years. Seeing that, as Australian booksellers and publishers know well, English and Scottish editors and publishers are constantly writing and enquiring after Australian copy, and Australian writers, what excuse would we have for bucking if the most conceited and least literary globe-trotter on the seven seas were to write us upside down and back to front from one end of Australia to the other—from the Gulf to the Bight, from Sydney
to Perth, and publish it in the biggest magazine in the world?
If we won’t send ’em facts—and the fiction too—if we are too easy going and careless, or tired, or haven’t got sufficient confidence in ourselves to do that—what are they to do? You don’t suppose a British journalist is going to hump swag, dig, shear, go droving, knock down his cheques in the city, fence, grub, cut scrub and dig tanks and get lambed down at bush shanties, and ‘run in’ at bush towns, and have the Out-Backs horrors and perish of thirst on the great awful blazing plains for the best part of a life time, in order to get at the local colour of the Australian Bush? Or tramp the cities with the unemployed and doss in the Domain—to be knocked up and moved on by a policeman every hour or so—so as to obtain concrete facts concerning Australian city life and the pessimism necessary to the life of Australian literature?
The hoaxer continued to spruik his fantasies after his exposure, enterprisingly appearing in the South African music hall in 1899 as ‘The greatest liar on earth’. But the same trick failed miserably when he toured Australia in 1901: he was booed from the stage. He remarried in 1915 under his pen name, although by then he had long fallen from public view.
Henri Louis Grien, alias Louis de Rougemont, died in poverty in 1921 under yet another name—Louis Redman. As the Daily Chronicle observed in its recollections on the occasion of the hoaxer’s death, if Grien had simply written his story as a work of fiction ‘it might have been selling to this day, and the author might have ended his days in greater comfort, if not luxury’.
Great Australian Journeys Page 20