Bearing Witness

by Peter Rees

  Australia beckoned.

  5

  The lure of the pen

  Charles Bean, alone on the deck of the mail steamer S.S. Ophir, was intent on capturing the first glimpse of the homeland he had left as a boy of nine and was returning to as a man of twenty-five. At sunrise on 8 December 1904, Bean was spellbound by the ‘red fleecy clouds . . . and . . . a yellow sky.’ As the steamer moved slowly through the Indian Ocean towards Fremantle, Bean stood on the eastern deck, and ‘faint and low along the horizon—but not far off—was Australia!’ The air was still, and all Bean could hear was the lapping of the water and the purring of the engines. He was the only passenger on deck.

  A tug kept pace with the Ophir, and Bean watched its crew going quietly about their work. The contrast with the ports at which the ship had called during the six-week voyage struck him. Port after port had teamed with interest, colour and excitement, ‘places where the mere sale of a shawl at a roadside booth was in itself a drama in many acts; where the carrying of luggage across a wharf raised the noise and dust of a dog-fight.’ At Marseilles and Naples, ‘dark beauties with bright eyes and long lashes had ogled us with trinkets and opera glasses and silk stuffs; they had chattered, laughed, screamed, fought one another over the defenceless bodies of hesitating purchasers.’ But off the coast of Western Australia, it was already different. Things were done with barely a word uttered. ‘A nod, and the tug was beside us and a man was coming aboard; a monosyllable, and the boat was steadily moving away again on some business of her own. Here were men who calmly saw what had to be done, and went about it in quiet agreement.’

  During the long voyage Bean had time to reflect on his return to Australia, and delved into his memory for images from his childhood. They emerged as a collection of ‘vague and isolated reminiscences of a dim past, such rags and scraps from early years as a child will carry with him into manhood.’ Such thoughts filled his mind as he waited to go ashore. He pictured a ‘colliery in the Blue Mountains, caught long ago haphazard from the window of a passing train—the tall chimnies [sic] smoking angrily, a solitary wheel turning lazily over the pit’s mouth, and the steep sides of the Blue Mountains frowning at you from above.’ Among these fragmented images were ‘yellow goslings on a waterhole, the road running by to a little western farm, thatched, dishevelled, muddy.’

  As the ship docked at Fremantle, Bean was relieved to see the crew on the tenders, ‘free–looking men in slouch felt hats.’ He marvelled that he was 19,000 kilometres from England. ‘And here at last, at the end of the world, were men of English race, English order, English quiet, and the English language. It was very much like a coming home. Thank goodness!’

  A warm greeting from his mother’s family lay in store for him on arrival in Hobart eight days later. Tennis parties and picnics followed over the Christmas–New Year period. His grandmother wrote to Lucy: ‘Your boy Charley is here and has won the hearts of all. We are delighted with him.’ Sydney was where he was headed, though, and in January 1905 he moved into a house in inner-city Darlinghurst. The rent was 30 shillings a week. His landlady, Laura Mason, appears to have served as a surrogate mother for a young man away from home.

  Bean began teaching Greek at Sydney Grammar while investigating a career in the law. But teaching was not for him. ‘I was always in difficulties there for though I read and wrote Greek well I was always hopeless at Greek grammar, and it did not take the class long to find this out.’ He also appears to have coached cricket but left the school before the first term ended to take a job in a law office. He remembered the relief he felt on giving up his Greek class. It was not long before he visited Bathurst, writing to his mother in England that ‘I do feel very proud of my little birthplace.’

  The visit coincided with the publication in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph on 13 April 1905 of a long and detailed article that Bean had written about the naval aspects of the then-current Russo-Japanese War. Among his earliest contacts on his return to Sydney was Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson. Again, the link was through his father, who had taught Paterson at Sydney Grammar. Paterson had become a national figure through the publication of such poems as ‘The Man from Snowy River’, and had also built a reputation as a war correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald during the Boer War. Paterson was editor of the Evening News and the Daily Telegraph was its morning stablemate. He had been a solicitor before entering journalism, and was keen to help the son of his old teacher. It is likely that he facilitated the publication of Bean’s article, which sought to explain the importance of the naval conflict from the perspective of Britain and, by extension, Australia.

  Bean’s article speculated that the war would produce a titanic fight between two great armoured battle fleets. ‘It is of vast importance to the British people that the modern battleship should emerge from the struggle vindicated, and it should be proved to be the proper weapon for a maritime nation,’ he wrote.

  Bean’s thinking would have been influenced by the knowledge that Japan’s small navy was equipped with several British-supplied warships of recent construction. The Russian fleet was larger but antiquated. Command of the sea would be essential to victory on land. As a result, military and civilian observers from every major power closely followed the course of the war—among them Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton, the military representative of the British Indian Army with the Japanese army in Manchuria. Hamilton was destined to play a major part in Bean’s life within just a few years.

  The contact with Paterson was important for Bean because it introduced him to Sydney’s journalistic circles. However, there was a more immediate focus for him than writing for newspapers: he began work as the associate of one of the city’s leading legal figures, Mr Justice Sir William Owen, senior puisne judge of the NSW Supreme Court, ranking just below the chief justice. Based on his call to the Bar in England, Bean was admitted to the New South Wales Bar on 13 February 1905.

  The job had been organised through Mrs Annie Selwyn, a friend of his parents and widow of Bishop John Selwyn, who approached the judge on Bean’s behalf. For practical purposes, a judge’s associate was something like a private secretary. Under direction of the judge, the associate supervised the mechanics of jury selection and administration of the jurymen’s oath. Throughout a trial the associate would sit at a low bench below the judge, within whispering distance, managing court records and performing various other administrative tasks, and generally liaising between Bench and Bar. For Bean as a young barrister, it was a transitional job. It provided him with an opportunity not only to meet judges, barristers and solicitors, but also to study Australian law and legal procedure.

  Before he started practice in New South Wales, Bean had read for the English Bar with a barrister who was an expert in admiralty law and another who specialised in the commercial law area of marine insurance law. However, he was to find that such work was not common in Sydney at the time, and that major litigation of that type was more likely to be conducted in London. Under the tutelage of Justice Owen, Bean had the opportunity to observe a wide range of the work of New South Wales courts, and the high drama of a politically charged Royal Commission.

  Justice Owen introduced his associate to each of the major types of jurisdiction exercised by a New South Wales Supreme Court judge, giving him the privileged perspective of an insider who was in the right place at the right time. Bean later recalled that as the Royal Commission over which Justice Owen was presiding dragged on, his thoughts were again focusing on journalism and writing. It was clear that Bean was never really captured by the law, and his interest in it was at best lukewarm. ‘I amused myself writing articles ready for publication when I should give up the associateship.’

  One of those articles, published in The Brentwoodian magazine of his old school, recounted the tale of four sons of a squatter who beat off an attack by bushranger Ben Hall’s gang near Goulburn. Bean had apparently heard the story from one of the sons who escaped and, having known of the Hall gang from his Bat
hurst childhood, regarded the outlaws as ‘scoundrels’. Because ‘Australian bushmen have not a habit of missing anything at short ranges,’ the boys had to be quick-witted to avoid being shot. Bean’s aim, clearly, was to tell an Australian story—one that happened in May 1864, not 1867, as he wrote—that would capture the imagination of the boys of Brentwood. In doing so, he clearly took a certain subdued pride in the prowess of both the boys and the bushrangers.

  By early 1907 Bean was giving more serious consideration to leaving the law. In a letter to his family, he hinted about his future career direction: ‘Now here’s a piece of news for family consumption only. I took some articles I had written to the Editor of the Morning Herald and he told me he would take a series of about nine of them. So that of itself would keep me on my legs for a good time. I have to work pretty hard getting them ready in time; but it is such a good start that it is more than worth it.’

  In March that year Bean quit his associateship with Justice Owen, who himself was approaching retirement. ‘It was a pleasant life but promised nothing; so I told the dear old judge that I had decided to strike out for myself; he agreed.’ Bean moved into Wigram Chambers in Sydney, where he found members of the Bar with social connections similar to his own: Sydney Grammar School; All Saints’ College, Bathurst; and the Church of England. But the times were difficult for barristers, of whom there was a glut.

  It did not take long for Bean to realise that his personality was not best suited to the Bar. He tried to conquer the weaknesses of being ‘a nervous self-conscious speaker, very liable to break down, or anyway to do injustice to my subject through extreme nervousness’:

  I had partly overcome this by going down to the Sydney School of Arts on debating nights and practising there . . . but for the bar you need nerves of iron; you have to be ready for sudden home thrusts, which are sometimes fair and sometimes not, and I never felt sure that I should keep my head: I was more afraid of it than of missing those catches at Clifton, and this fear would have hampered me horribly. Probably one might have overcome it, as one did the weakness in fielding, by practice.

  Bean’s name was publicly listed among those of barristers practising from Wigram Chambers, and he was listed in the Sydney phone book as a barrister from mid-1907, but his already half-hearted interest in a legal career evaporated.

  At the end of a few months of waiting for briefs I recognised that the bar was not the career for me—I had seen men with far more brains than I, in England, still almost briefless at middle age; my interests were much more general, and I had seen one or two things of late which increased my distaste for the work—so much so that I tore up the only cheque I ever received for it.

  Too timid to be a barrister and unimpressed by what he had seen in rural courts, Bean felt that there was something morally distasteful about practising law. Whatever it was that caused him to tear up that lone cheque, he was decisively putting the law behind him. In all this, he appears not to have confided in any of his judges—particularly Owen—or any member of the Bar. He turned instinctively to Banjo Paterson—not in the context of the solicitor he had once been but as an editor. He now knew he was cut out for neither teaching nor the law. He could get work as a schoolteacher, but he realised that his ability to impose his authority on his pupils was not high: ‘I was too soft with the boys—or, rather, too anxious to please and be popular with them. Father always said that was a fatal weakness in any schoolmaster—and he did not know that I possessed it.’

  By now, Bean knew definitively what he wanted to do. He had always had ‘an irresistible tendency’ towards writing. ‘I decided that before I settled down to a career for which I was only ill-fitted, I would have one fling at work which I really loved—writing.’ It was the only occupation that made sense.

  6

  Seeds of the myth

  Strictly speaking, Charles Bean was not ‘a new chum’, or recent immigrant—rather, he had returned home. But during his time with Justice Owen he had amused himself by writing and illustrating a series of articles that he envisaged publishing as a book capturing his perceptions on his return to the land of his birth. He planned to call it The Impressions of a New Chum. Bean took the manuscript to the publisher Angus & Robertson. It was rejected. In retrospect, he described it as a rather crude and somewhat priggish production. ‘I was afterwards exceedingly glad that it was so firmly rejected, though it was written with enthusiasm and meant well.’ Even in his self-reflections, both in diaries and in public accounts of his life, Bean still sought a truthful analysis and was not afraid to judge himself critically.

  He took several of the chapters to The Sydney Morning Herald, whose editor, Thomas Heney, agreed to publish them under the title ‘Australia Revisited’. The writings reflected the wide-ranging interests that caught the imagination of both Bean the observer and Bean the putative social reformer. A strong idealism ran through his writing. The Herald published the series of eight articles under the byline ‘C.W.’ Bean was clearly fascinated by what constituted an Australian and how the national character had been fashioned:

  Your first shock when you find the Australian native is to discover that he is not a black man; your second to discover that he is not an Englishman. At home we liked to consider him an Englishman, and it cuts against the grain when he draws a distinction . . . Australian country life is not in the least like life in any other country except New Zealand, and it has hammered out of the old stock a new man. [He] is a tall, spare man, clean and wiry rather than muscular; in face, . . . a certain refined ascetic strength.

  His character is the simplest imaginable. The key to it is just this—that he takes everything on its merits, and nothing on authority. Perhaps he goes further, and takes everything on its merits, except for a bias against authority.

  Bean saw the Australian as a lover of the truth, and he had seen this borne out often in Australian boys at British schools. Likewise, once an Australian made a friend, he would ‘trust you to death, and beyond.’ And he was always fighting something:

  In the bush it is drought, fires, unbroken horses, wild cattle; and not unfrequently strong men. Never was such a country for defending itself with its fists. You will see more fighting in Sydney in a week than in London in a year . . . An Australian will not pocket an insult. Where an Italian or a Spaniard would knife you, an Australian will fight you . . . All this fighting with men and with nature, fierce as any warfare, has made of the Australian as fine a fighting man as exists. He would be the best soldier, too, were it not for the lack of just that one quality which is necessary to turn the fighting man into the soldier . . . Beyond a doubt it is difficult for him to obey any order, especially one of which he does not at the time see the precise expediency.

  Bean felt that the Australian had in him the stuff of military greatness. ‘If the right and reason of going to be killed is clear to him, he will be killed cheerfully and with a very pretty courage, and will do a deal more damage before he is killed, and perhaps—if you will pardon it—will not be killed at all in the end, and that where 99 out of 100 would be slaughtered like sheep.’

  Here, perhaps, was the seed of the myth of Bean’s Anzacs: tough, resourceful Australians, willing to sacrifice themselves for a good cause, but, in all likelihood, so tough and resourceful as to refuse to be sacrificed but rather surviving, even thriving, on the battlefield. He was in awe of their skill and daring as horsemen in particular. ‘Breaking-in horses, which to the new chum, appear to go temporarily and violently insane, is the ordinary amusement for a Sunday afternoon on a station.’

  These early articles showed Bean’s fledgling fascination with the effect of cities on people, and he warned Australia against following the European example. While he saw refinement and luxury in Sydney, he also saw the vice of the old world ‘gnawing away at the heart of the new’. He feared for Australian cities and city-bred people, who would probably go the way of other cities around the world. ‘As soon as a nation begins to shut itself up in cities, it
begins to decay,’ Bean wrote.

  Echoing the then-popular theory of social Darwinism, Bean envisaged generations of city dwellers becoming smaller in body and weaker in courage and resolve than their forebears. He drew a comparison with London: ‘The nerve of the nation, its levelheadedness and fitness for a national emergency, desert it as they are deserting the modern Londoner. In their place you get a sort of beetle cleverness, an almost unnatural sharpening of the wits in the furious race for wealth.’ His solution was simple: to make life in the cities as similar as possible to that of the country.

  Bean saw that the bush experience was producing a man of immense value, not just to Australia but to British communities the world over. He saw the issue in heroic terms: the Australian from the country was ‘the Briton re-born, as it were—a Briton with the stamina and freshness of the 16th century living amongst the material advantages of the 20th century.’ He saw life in the bush as the life of an adventurer. ‘Fierce toil, bitter desperate fighting, fighting with fire and with flood, with unbroken horses, wild cattle, unruly men, interspersed with lapses of ease and comfort.’

  Bean believed the Anglo-Saxon race in Australia could still preserve its strength of body, mind and character in spite of city life. The answer was for city councils to ensure sufficient space for Australians to play whatever games they wanted. By doing so, they would be ‘buying the salvation of their race, and buying it dirt cheap.’

  In the two and half years he had been back in Australia, Bean had clearly developed strong, utopian opinions about the superiority of bush life. Influenced by his work on circuit courts and his own travels, he perhaps drew inspiration from Banjo Paterson who, after his earlier successful ballads had not long published the hugely popular Old Bush Songs. Paterson’s rhythmic verses struck a chord with a young man enthralled with the romance of the bush.