Larrikins, Bush Tales and Other Great Australian Stories

by Graham Seal

  The fate of Captain Cadell

  Francis Cadell was one of those colourful, slightly larger-than-life characters who populate our colonial history and folklore. Along with such identities as the scoundrel ‘Bully’ Hayes (who also features in Cadell’s life story), the fabulist Louis de Rougemont and the amazing Calvert, the sea- and river-going Captain Cadell made a lasting impact on many parts of the continent, including Western Australia.

  Born in Scotland in 1822, Cadell went to sea on an East Indiaman at the age of fourteen. By the time he was seventeen he had taken part in the so-called Opium Wars between Britain and China. He followed this early adventuring with a swashbuckling life that took in piracy, ship design, commanding naval engagements during the Maori Wars, exploring what is now the Northern Territory, gun running, pearling and the trade in human flesh known as ‘blackbirding’.

  His main claim to fame, though, was his almost single-handed creation of the Murray River paddle-steamer trade from the early 1850s. As with many other periods in Cadell’s fortunate life, this one left him with a number of high-level allies who supported him in some of his less glorious subsequent careers.

  Largely forgotten to the history books, Cadell’s adventures regularly filled the pages of the newspapers during his tumultuous life. He was one of those aspirational, adventuring types often encountered in the Australian colonies, described by his biographer as one of ‘those over-achieving British Empire-builders who litter the Victorian world like soldier ants on a forest floor—so competent, so dependable, so energetic and yet so relaxed about it all. They never seemed to doubt what they were doing as they walked into other people’s countries and—outnumbered thousands to one—imposed British law and order, built railways and ports, made fortunes and went to church on Sundays.’

  While Cadell may have broken more laws than he imposed and rarely seems to have stepped inside a church, he was one of these driven pioneers, if a decidedly ambivalent one.

  One of the many dubious periods of Cadell’s life involved him in the early days of the Western Australian pearling trade. He was another of the variously optimistic, crazed or desperate band of entrepreneurs who created that industry and, it seems, contributed to its unhappy record of human misery. As well as apparently mistreating his indentured labourers, Cadell was rumoured to be running barracoons, or slave markets, on islands off the Western Australian coast.

  Cadell had the knack of allying himself with unsavoury partners while managing to remain more or less respectable. Certainly the fame he earned from his pioneering of the Murray paddle-steam trade—which materially assisted the development of South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales—convinced many to give him the benefit of the doubt throughout his numerous escapades.

  During his Western Australian troubles, Sir Dominic Daly, the ex-governor of South Australia, fortuitously turned up in Perth. His friendship with the mariner apparently provided sufficient establishment influence to defuse the very strong interest the authorities were showing in Cadell’s pearling activities.

  But despite his friends in high places, his lovable rogue personality and his acumen, Cadell met an untimely and mysterious fate in what are now Indonesian waters. Ever the entrepreneur, he was pursuing another of his business schemes and pushed his crew just a little too hard. The boat returned without its captain and Francis Cadell was never seen again.

  The Fenian

  On 10 January 1868, an Irish political prisoner and Fenian named John Boyle O’Reilly was marched into Fremantle Prison. O’Reilly had been guilty of little active subversion, though he had plotted much. Following a brief career as a journalist, in 1863 he enlisted as a trooper in the 10th Hussars, then headquartered in Dublin. He was recruited to the clandestine Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB, also known as the Fenians), a forerunner of the modern Irish Republican Army (IRA), in 1865. Participating in the preparations for a planned rising that never took place, O’Reilly was arrested along with most of his co-conspirators in February 1866. After a trial he was sentenced to death by firing squad, but had this sentence commuted to twenty years’ penal servitude. With 61 other Fenians, O’Reilly was transported to Western Australia aboard the Hougoumont in October 1867.

  Sixteen of these men, plus O’Reilly himself, had been members of the British army and were segregated from the civilian Fenians and the common convicts. When advance news of this Irish ‘weight of woe’ reached the colony, segments of the Swan River community went into panic, fearing that the dreaded Irish, especially those with military training, would murder them in their beds. The fear was especially high in Fremantle, where the Fenians would be held. So great was the consternation, heightened by threats from some quarters to prevent the Fenians disembarking, that the disciplinarian Governor Hampton had his residence moved from distant Perth to Fremantle in an effort to calm the more excitable colonists.

  When they did arrive, the entire complement of convicts and Fenians was disembarked at dawn, and marched in chains through Fremantle’s forbidding limestone prison. They then underwent the same initiation into servitude as all other prison inmates: each was bathed, cropped, barbered and examined by a doctor, and their physical and personal details were recorded. They were then issued with the regulation summer clothing: cap, grey jacket, vest, two cotton shirts, one flannel shirt, two handkerchiefs, two pairs of trousers, two pairs of socks and a pair of boots.

  O’Reilly and his companions were now ‘probationary convicts’. If they behaved themselves for the remaining half of their sentence, they could be granted a ticket of leave, a dispensation allowing them to live and work much as any free colonist as long as they reported regularly to the magistrate.

  Like most other transports, John Boyle O’Reilly the revolutionary was soon sent to work on the road-making around Bunbury from March 1868. There were over 3220 convicts in the colony at this time, though only a hundred or so on the road gangs in the Bunbury area. Later in his life O’Reilly would publish a classic novel, Moondyne, based on his experiences in this part of Western Australia. He dedicated this work to ‘the interests of humanity, to the prisoner, whoever and wherever he may be’.

  In the novel itself, O’Reilly provides some evocative details of the conditions. He begins by describing the bush and the work of the free sawyers:

  During the midday heat not a bird stirred among the mahogany and gum trees. On the flat tops of the low banksia the round heads of the white cockatoos could be seen in thousands, motionless as the trees themselves. Not a parrot had the vim to scream. The chirping insects were silent. Not a snake had courage to rustle his hard skin against the hot and dead bush-grass. The bright-eyed iguanas were in their holes. The mahogany sawyers had left their logs and were sleeping in the cool sand of their pits. Even the travelling ants had halted on their wonderful roads, and sought the shade of a bramble.

  He then goes on to contrast this with the lot of himself and the other convict toilers:

  All free things were at rest; but the penetrating click of the axe, heard far through the bush, and now and again a harsh word of command, told that it was a land of bondmen.

  From daylight to dark, through the hot noon as steadily as in the cool evening, the convicts were at work on the roads—the weary work that has no wages, no promotion, no incitement, no variation for good or bad, except stripes for the laggard.

  Moondyne was written in the light of freedom, but it echoed some of the verse in which the unhappy O’Reilly cried out his fears and those of all transported to the Swan River colony:

  Have I no future left me?

  Is there no struggling ray

  From the sun of my life outshining

  Down on my darksome way?

  Will there no gleam of sunshine

  Cast o’er my path its light?

  Will there no star of hope rise

  Out of this gloom of night?

  The light did shine for O’Reilly. The politics surrounding his fate and that of his rebellious companions was a caus
e célèbre of the time, resonating with the more romanticised aspects of the Irish struggle against English oppression. The correspondence files of the Colonial Office during this period are full of letters from respectable members of the British middle classes urging the release or pardoning of the Fenians, and there was also a considerable amount of correspondence relating particularly to O’Reilly’s case. As well as these official representations, there were more clandestine plots in effect.

  In early March 1869, the Fenian transportee was whisked away to freedom in the not-so-United States of America by a Yankee whaler. His rescue—an early example of globalisation—had been carefully plotted by the free Irish community in Western Australia, in league with elements of the Catholic Church, the American Irish community and its sympathisers. O’Reilly celebrated his 25th birthday in the middle of the Indian Ocean on his secret voyage back to England from where, under the noses of those authorities who badly wanted to capture him, he made his way to America, freedom and a promising future. In America he was influential in plans to free the Fenians remaining in Western Australia five years later. At Easter 1874, O’Reilly’s six Fenian companions were rescued from bondage by an American whaler, the Catalpa, and taken to safety in the United States.

  O’Reilly went on to a glittering journalistic and political career in America. He remained deeply involved in Irish patriotic activities and is remembered in that country, in Australia and in the country of his birth as an outstanding patriot.

  The last bushranger

  Jack Bradshaw, self-styled ‘last of the bushrangers’, was a spieler, or con man, who led a colourful life of crime, repentance and self-publicising that would not shame a modern marketing executive. He arrived in Australia from Ireland at the age of fourteen in 1860 and found work in the bush. He also worked as a petty trickster with a crook known as ‘Professor Bruce’, whose specialisation was reading people’s heads and telling them amazing but true things about their character. This scam involved Jack arriving in town and finding out about the locals then slipping back to Bruce after a couple of days with the information. Bruce then entered the town in a flamboyant manner promising to reveal all—for a reasonable consideration.

  Jack moved on to horse stealing with an accomplice endearingly named ‘Lovely Riley’. But his real ambition was to rob a bank. He and Riley attacked the Coolah bank in 1876; they got the manager to open the safe but just as they began to rifle through its contents, the manager’s pregnant wife came in. She gave the desperadoes a piece of her mind and they turned tail and fled, empty-handed.

  Finally, at Quirindi in 1880, Jack realised his ambition and, once more in company with ‘Lovely Riley’, successfully robbed the bank of 2000 pounds. Escaping to New England, Riley’s loose lips gave the game away and Jack decamped hurriedly to Armidale. Here, under a false name, he met, wooed and married the daughter of a wealthy squatter but was soon after unmasked and arrested. Fortunately, there was no bloodshed and he received a twelve-year sentence but was out again by 1888 and returned to his surprisingly amenable wife. Then, caught stealing mail, Jack went back to prison until 1901.

  Inside, Jack saw the light and used the time to educate himself. When he got out he took up writing and lecturing about his highly glorified exploits. His first book, Highway Robbery Under Arms, told the story of the Quirindi robbery and was followed with several more, often overlapping titles that purported to tell the true stories of his relationships with many infamous bushrangers. Jack had made good use of his experience with Professor Bruce through all his years in prison, picking up inside knowledge of other criminals and their doings, real or not. He spun these into yarns that gave him a basic, if unreliable, living.

  In 1928, the now ageing bushranger became a boarder in Phillipine Humphrey’s grandmother’s home. Phillipine recalled, ‘He was the gentlest old man you could ever meet by then. He told lots of interesting stories and taught me many Irish songs.’ Four years later, Jack moved to St Joseph’s Little Sisters of the Poor Home in Randwick, New South Wales; Phillipine and her grandmother often visited Jack here, and he often said that the younger woman reminded him of his own daughter.

  Jack died in 1937 at the age of 90 and was buried at Rookwood Cemetery in an unmarked grave, which has since been graced with a tombstone.

  Lawson’s people

  People loved Henry Lawson not in spite of his failings and afflictions, but because of them. He was an extreme version of themselves, always struggling to make ends meet, battling the creature, looking for work, supporting—or not—a family. Forever striving and usually failing, just as they were, Henry Lawson’s life was larger than their own but still essentially the same. His writing was infused with his life, and with theirs. ‘My people’, he called them.

  The rugged contours of Henry Lawson’s life began in 1867. Born to Peter and Louisa in Grenfell, New South Wales, he grew up in goldfields camps and bush huts, receiving an indifferent education, and from a young age was seen as an outsider. He did not mix well, was not good at physical activities, and was partly deaf. His schoolmates called him ‘barmy Henry’ and shunned him, as he ignored them in return.

  Peter and Louisa’s troubled marriage faded away in the late 1870s and Louisa moved to Sydney, where she eventually established a career as a writer and pioneer feminist. After working with his father on Blue Mountains building contracts, Henry joined his mother and siblings in 1883. He was apprenticed for some years as a coach painter. Aware of his educational failings, he studied at night school and twice attempted to matriculate, unsuccessfully, to Sydney University. Encouraged, if distantly, by his forbidding mother, Henry became interested in writing and slowly began to achieve some success. In 1887 he had his first piece, ‘A Song of the Republic’, accepted by the literary magazine The Bulletin. In the next few years some of his most popular verses appeared, including ‘Faces in the Street’ and ‘Andy’s Gone With Cattle’.

  His fame grew and he published more and more verse, articles and later, short stories, the form in which he truly excelled. But his need to earn a living and to pay for his worsening addiction to alcohol meant that he needed to devote time and energy to finding work, time that took away from writing. In 1892, The Bulletin subsidised a trip to the drought-stricken regions of western New South Wales. He carried his swag for months, returning with the material that he would mine for the rest of his creative life. In the short term, the trip produced the classic stories ‘The Bush Undertaker’ and ‘The Union Buries its Dead’, among others. Four years later, his first important collection of stories, While the Billy Boils, was published, as was his verse collection, In the Days When the World Was Wide.

  That same year he married Bertha Bredt. Family life began romantically, with a trip to Western Australia to dig for gold, but they only made it to Perth. Henry did some writing, house painting and other work but they were unable to make a go of it. Fed up with living in a tent, Bertha and Henry returned to Sydney where he soon took up again with his old mates and his old ways. Next year there was a futile trip to New Zealand where the family lived in deep isolation, teaching at a bush school. Once again, there was no alternative but to go home again. Through all this, Henry wrote, often drank and always struggled to make ends meet, particularly as children began being born. By 1898 his drinking had become so serious that he had to be institutionally ‘dried out’. The treatment was successful and Henry remained sober for some years.

  To say that Henry Lawson went to Britain would be inaccurate; he did take his family to London, but spent several years there without leaving the city. He succeeded in having a number of books published or re-published in Britain, but the event was a literary dead end. It also marked the effective end of his marriage. The return of his manic drinking, mood swings and frequent destitution were beyond even Bertha’s toleration. She had her own serious mental problems requiring extended hospitalisation, and Henry’s health also declined. In 1902, the family returned to Australia via Fremantle, where Bertha left Henry
drinking and took the children home to Sydney. From that point Henry and his family were effectively estranged and he pursued his personal journey to hell, accompanied by the grog, madness, poverty, imprisonment and never-ending sponging off friends and colleagues.

  With his marriage disintegrating, Henry tried to kill himself in December 1902. His drinking and inability to pay family support landed him in Darlinghurst Gaol on several occasions, accompanied by stints at the attached asylum, and there were a number of unsuccessful attempts to settle him in the country. Habitually drunk, impoverished and depressed, Lawson became a familiar pathetic figure on the streets of Sydney, cared for mainly by his long-suffering housekeeper Mrs Byers.

  By 1916 Henry’s loyal mates had become desperate and tried once again to save his life and the precious gift he had squandered so casually. A group of them gathered in the office of Labor Premier Holman. Led by F.J. Archibald, editor of The Bulletin and one of Henry’s most loyal supporters and patrons, they discussed the need to save Lawson from himself, preferably by getting him away from the soaks of the city. There was the possibility of a pension, though this was difficult in an era before governments were expected to support the sick and elderly. Someone suggested that a better approach would be to give the writer a paid job of some kind. Why not post him to the recently initiated Murrumbidgee Irrigation Areas? He could have a regular wage and a cottage to live in, and in return would write verse and stories promoting the great experimental water dream. Best of all, the MIA was officially a ‘dry’ region in which alcohol was prohibited.

  Henry Lawson’s friends agreed and so the once passionate firebrand poet became a salaried bureaucrat of the New South Wales government service. Being Henry Lawson, though, it was not likely his career would proceed like that of any other public servant.