Although Gordon is now little known, ‘The Sick Stockrider’ was one of the first poems to capture the bush tradition that Banjo Paterson and a host of later poets would refine into the famous bush ballad. Its use of Australian place names, situations like running down dingoes and chasing bushrangers, as well as the last resting place beneath the wattles, all became standard images of bush poetry and song.
HOLD hard, Ned! Lift me down once more, and lay me in the shade.
Old man, you’ve had your work cut out to guide
Both horses, and to hold me in the saddle when I sway’d,
All through the hot, slow, sleepy, silent ride.
The dawn at ‘Moorabinda’ was a mist rack dull and dense,
The sunrise was a sullen, sluggish lamp;
I was dozing in the gateway of Arbuthnot’s bound’ry fence,
I was dreaming on the Limestone cattle camp.
We crossed the creek at Carricksford, and sharply through the haze,
And suddenly the sun shot flaming forth;
To southward lay ‘Katawa’, with the sandpeaks all ablaze,
And the flush’d fields of Glen Lomond lay to north.
Now westward winds the bridle path that leads to Lindisfarm,
And yonder looms the double-headed Bluff;
From the far side of the first hill, when the skies are clear and calm,
You can see Sylvester’s woolshed fair enough.
Five miles we used to call it from our homestead to the place
Where the big tree spans the roadway like an arch;
’Twas here we ran the dingo down that gave us such a chase
Eight years ago—or was it nine?—last March.
’Twas merry in the glowing morn, among the gleaming grass,
To wander as we’ve wandered many a mile,
And blow the cool tobacco cloud, and watch the white wreaths pass,
Sitting loosely in the saddle all the while.
’Twas merry ’mid the blackwoods, when we spied the station roofs,
To wheel the wild scrub cattle at the yard,
With a running fire of stockwhips and a fiery run of hoofs;
Oh! the hardest day was never then too hard!
Aye! we had a glorious gallop after ‘Starlight’ and his gang,
When they bolted from Sylvester’s on the flat;
How the sun-dried reed-beds crackled, how the flint-strewn ranges rang
To the strokes of ‘Mountaineer’ and ‘Acrobat’.
Hard behind them in the timber, harder still across the heath,
Close beside them through the tea-tree scrub we dash’d;
And the golden-tinted fern leaves, how they rustled underneath!
And the honeysuckle osiers, how they crash’d!
We led the hunt throughout, Ned, on the chestnut and the grey,
And the troopers were three hundred yards behind,
While we emptied our six-shooters on the bushrangers at bay,
In the creek with stunted box-tree for a blind!
There you grappled with the leader, man to man and horse to horse,
And you roll’d together when the chestnut rear’d;
He blazed away and missed you in that shallow water-course—
A narrow shave—his powder singed your beard!
In these hours when life is ebbing, how those days when life was young
Come back to us; how clearly I recall
Even the yarns Jack Hall invented, and the songs Jem Roper sung;
And where are now Jem Roper and Jack Hall?
Aye! nearly all our comrades of the old colonial school,
Our ancient boon companions, Ned, are gone;
Hard livers for the most part, somewhat reckless as a rule,
It seems that you and I are left alone.
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!
Ah! those days and nights we squandered at the Logans’ in the glen—
The Logans, man and wife, have long been dead.
Elsie’s tallest girl seems taller than your little Elsie then;
And Ethel is a woman grown and wed.
I’ve had my share of pastime, and I’ve done my share of toil,
And life is short—the longest life a span;
I care not now to tarry for the corn or for the oil,
Or for the wine that maketh glad the heart of man.
For good undone and gifts misspent and resolutions vain,
’Tis somewhat late to trouble. This I know—
I should live the same life over, if I had to live again;
And the chances are I go where most men go.
The deep blue skies wax dusky, and the tall green trees grow dim,
The sward beneath me seems to heave and fall;
And sickly, smoky shadows through the sleepy sunlight swim,
And on the very sun’s face weave their pall.
Let me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave,
With never stone or rail to fence my bed;
Should the sturdy station children pull the bush flowers on my grave,
I may chance to hear them romping overhead.
NEW AUSTRALIA BOUND
In the early 1890s a great struggle of shearers, sailors, miners and other workers against what they considered the unjust impositions of capital tore the country apart. This period saw the creation of the modern trade union movement and the birth of what is now the Australian Labor Party. But ultimately the forces of capital, as the strikers called their enemy, were victorious. The bitter disillusionment and despair of some workers, sharpened by the economic depression of the time, led some to take a radical journey. Over two hundred working men and their families sailed away from Australia to build a just new world on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
Their leader was the labour organiser and writer William Lane, a passionate believer in socialism as a way to a better life for working people. Influenced by the wave of interest in utopian communities, Lane wrote a novel promoting the notion of a working man’s paradise and in the same year formed the New Australia Cooperative Settlement Association. Rejecting capitalist Australia as a suitable location for a socialist heaven, Lane and his many followers resolved to establish New Australia in the jungles of Paraguay.
Land was gifted by the Paraguayan government, which was then rebuilding the country’s population and infrastructure after a costly war in the late 1860s. They sailed aboard the Royal Tar in July 1893, bound for Montevideo via Cape Horn—to ‘The Virgin Ground’, as the Redgum song catchily put it in 1980. The land where they would build Lane’s egalitarian, teetotaller and deeply racist utopia was in the middle of nowhere, 170 kilometres south-east of Asuncion.
The trouble began early. Not unlike many other idealistic visionaries, Lane’s dream rapidly became a nightmare. He turned into an autocratic despot, brooking no other opinions. Conflicts between the colonists quickly flared and were only aggravated by Lane’s leadership, or lack of it. The first settlement, Cosme, soon split as breakaway groups founded their own communities. There were further schisms, worsened by Lane’s absence on a near three-year trip to England between 1896 and 1898. But by the time he left on this journey, disillusionment was already rife among those who had followed him. Ted Channing, previously a Brisbane plumber, wrote from the New Australian Settlement in June 1894:
Dear Ben,
No doubt you think by this time that I have forgotten you, but needless to say that is not the case. Things have been very
much mixed here from the beginning—our leader turned out a complete failure. As a leader he lacked courage and made favourites. You know what that would mean in a thing like this. Unfortunately he had no business tact, and did not pretend to have any. The only good point about him was that he conceived the idea of this Boheme, which I am sure will be a success now; every indication of this, since sentiment and idealist are taking second place to business and common sense, and the people seem to get along better together.
You know, of course, what our troubles have been—first the drink, then Billy Lane’s pigheadedness in trying to get the shadow and missing the substance, the retreat of Billy and a few followers (about forty), some of whom have already left him—his best men too. This is one of the finest schemes, and the best country to try it in that I know of. We are gradually dropping into our places.
There are two settlements—the one I am at is called Los Ovejos, the other is Loma Begua. We have about 2000 to 3000 head of cattle, about 50 pigs, 200 horses (very poor samples), about 50 or 60 working bullocks, about 8 or 10 single ploughs, 2 double-furrow ploughs, a mowing machine, a grist mill, a four-wheel trolly just built, 8 or 10 bullock drays. Two blacksmiths are at work fixing up some machinery that Walker bought dirt cheap. There are two blacksmith’s shops, one at each settlement, and two lathes, one mine and one the blacksmith’s. l am striking for the smith when not employed at my own work (plumbing). We work together.
There are to be two weddings here next Sunday, and all the fellows at Loma Itegua are coming over. These two will make six marriages that have taken place here, four in Lane’s reign, or, as they playfully call it, bondage, and two in freedom. All the single girls are engaged now, so you tell any of the girls that think of making a move in this direction that there are 100 young fellows waiting for wives, and, if they can’t offer them much money, they can offer them a home and three meals a day for certain, without fear of the landlord or sheriff’s officer poking his nose in, a quarter-acre of ground, and a house which you can furnish which way you like—to make the furniture.
The climate is like Queensland, rather colder in winter of a night when the wind is in the south, generally when rain is about. We have about forty or fifty acres under wheat, and the same under vegetables; in fact, things are beginning to look up beautifully, and you will see very different accounts of us now. Some of the people who went away at the first are applying to come back; three of them were here last week, and seemed highly delighted at the progress we have made, and expressed their sorrow at ever going away. Of course before they can be admitted again they will have to be balloted for. Please remember me to all my old friends, and let them know I shall be glad to reply to any letters they may send me . . .
By the time Ted Channing wrote his letter to The Queenslander inviting marriageable women to the venture, a large group of already married women had embarked on the Royal Tar’s second voyage to Paraguay. But all did not go smoothly, as reported under the subhead ‘Trouble with the Women’:
The excitement caused by Casey had no sooner cooled down than it broke out again in a fresh quarter—this time among the married women. One of these ladies was sick or indisposed, and the doctor ordered her some wine. The result is somewhat startling, especially considering that teetotalism is supposed to be one of the principles of New Australia. The ladies all rose in a body and demanded wine. If that woman got wine they must have wine also, for in the tyrannical, squatter-ridden land where they had lived, wine, it appears, was one of the articles of daily consumption, and the loss of this beverage was already commencing to tell on their constitutions. Here was a state of affairs that no one could have provided for, and no one seemed to know exactly how to deal with the trouble. A meeting was called as usual, but that was powerless. Threats of expulsion were of no use, and their sex protected them from violence. Nothing in the rules apparently could be found to solve the problem, and the meeting was finally quelled by a suggestion of the doctor. This was to give them as much wine as they wanted and let them drink it out, for no peace could be expected until it was done. This advice was followed, and peace reigned once more. The Royal Tar entered Monte Video without a spoonful of ‘comfort’ of any sort, except lime-juice.
By 1896, the Australian press was full of letters and reports from disgruntled New Australia colonists. One of these, originally published in the British press, was gloatingly re-printed in the conservative Australian newspaper, The Argus. It was from a man who had joined Lane’s experiment two years earlier, when he:
shook the dust of Australian soil from his feet and set off to create a Communistic Paradise somewhere in the mosquito-tormented forests of Paraguay. He was beckoned thither by dreams, dreams of a new social order, where the police-man was unknown and the capitalist was non-existent; where individualism was to be classed with typhoid as a deadly pestilence, and where, if there was not to be a community of wives there was at least to be a community of almost everything else. This particular member of New Australia, however, now writes to confess that this vision was nothing better than a mirage. The New Arcadia, where ‘each was to have not according to his deeds, but according to his needs’, and which was to give the signal for a social revolution to wondering mankind, has dwindled down to a little cluster of shabby, half savage, and more than half-starved settlements in Paraguay, their chief characteristics being a painful want of clothes and a perpetual ebullition of quarrels.
Anonymous journalists positively howled with delight at the failure of ‘the most lunatic social experiments’.
Socialism, with its dream of equality, its quarrel with individualism, every sane man knows to be pre-doomed to failure. It is in hopeless discord, not only with human nature, but with Nature. Men are diverse in physical and intellectual power, in the range of their wants, and the scale of their faculties; and a social system which proposes to efface these differences or to ignore them would wreck civilisation. But New Australia is the latest and most dramatic demonstration of this rudimentary fact!
The original settlement had by now split into at least five, often competing, groups. Lane’s vision was dead. The dreams and hopes of most of his followers were broken. Lane returned to his career in journalism and became a strongly conservative supporter of the British empire. The common property was subdivided into private lots and many of the colonists gradually drifted back to Australia or elsewhere. But some stayed and made lives for themselves and their children and grandchildren.
The poet Dame Mary Gilmore spent her childhood in New Australia, and said late in her life, in 1959, that while it was a communist experiment she did not feel that it had been a total failure.
There are still descendants of the New Australians in Paraguay, some living on the original farms. Although those who stayed often became more Paraguayan than Australian there has been a revival of interest in Oz in recent years. They ‘still call Australia home’, said one proud Paraguayan Australian on a recent ABC television documentary, though many have migrated to Australia or hope to. Despite their undoubted Australian origins the descendants of William Lane’s disaster qualify for no special entry privileges.
A SNOWBALL MARCH
One Sunday morning in October 1915, 3000 people attended a simple religious ceremony in the New South Wales country town of Gilgandra. Then 25 of them began walking to Sydney, over 500 kilometres away. They called themselves the Coo-ees and they planned to march through all the towns along their route gathering volunteers to fight for Australia in World War I.
As they set off they were accompanied by the largest crowd of locals ever seen and followed for a few miles ‘by a great cavalcade of horses and vehicles’. Everyone came out, including a guard of honour made up of young horsewomen. After more cheers and a parting volley from the local rifle club, off they went.
The government had taken a long time to approve this novel and unorthodox form of recruiting. But the decline of volunteers after the first flush of enthusiasm in 1914 had them worried and the Gilgan
dra Coo-ees eventually got the go-ahead. And did they go.
Through the heat and dust they marched on another 100 kilometres to Marthaguy, many of the Gilgandra folk still following them, so high was the excitement. A young woman declared that ‘if she had been a boy she would have marched all the way, and gone to the front with the contingent’. She promised to be in Sydney to greet the marchers when they arrived at Martin Place.
As they arrived at each new township the Coo-ees were met by residents cheering and carrying flags, then escorted to prepared camps and fed. Every morning they left with more recruits, flags flying and usually led by crowds of schoolchildren. There were speeches, cheers and enthusiastic renditions of the national anthem.
They reached Eumungerie on the second night. Here again there was music and dancing, speeches and appeals for funds for charity. People could not do enough for the Coo-ees, though most of the marchers, thinking about another day of uncomfortable marching, ‘were glad to “sneak” away to their blankets’.
The next day it rained. But that did not stop the marchers or dampen the exuberance of the residents of Mogriguy. In fact, the district had been in drought so the party was even bigger. One of the army officers placed in charge of the Coo-ees had to plead for his men to get a decent night’s sleep before tackling the longest stretch of the journey beginning next morning: ‘He said that he was beginning to think that the Turk would not kill the men, but that the turkey might, and that before they had gone very far on the road to Sydney.’ Despite the festivities, no men joined the marchers at Eumungerie.
After breakfast the next morning, the growing contingent tramped through sticky mud. Nine miles later they reached Brocklehurst for lunch. They ‘were then treated to a round of patriotic kissing by a bevy of Brocklehurst girls. The schoolchildren led the march on to the Dubbo road, and the girls escorted the recruits for a mile on their way despite the rain.’
Great Australian Journeys Page 24