Iverson is not a common surname in Australia, but Iversen in Germany assuredly is. Jack Iverson’s roots are in the old duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, not far from the modern border of Denmark and Germany, about thirty kilometres from Hamburg, and the progress of his forebears was almost as unlikely as his own.
What is today Germany was two centuries ago a jigsaw of 300 ill-fitting regional pieces, part of the disintegrating Holy Roman Empire. The Congress of Vienna in June 1815 rationalised these to a German Confederation of thirty-nine states, but many rough edges remained, not least the duchies: united since the middle ages with the King of Denmark as Duke, even though Holstein was almost wholly German and Schleswig partly so. They became in due course one of Europe’s most flammable regions, inspiring British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli to his famous aperçu that only three men had ever known the answer to the Schleswig-Holstein Question: one was dead, one was mad and he, Disraeli, had forgotten.
Ludwig Iversen, Jack Iverson’s grandfather, was born on 1 July 1825 in the fishing village of Apenrade, the youngest of six children. Little is known of his upbringing, though musical talent appears to have manifested itself early in his life, for he studied violin at the Vienna Conservatoire. Family lore also has it that he saw military service, and carried a musket ball in his shoulder the remainder of his life: if true, the wound was probably sustained during the Three Years’ War, which commenced when Danish nationalists sought to annex the duchies in 1848 and were resisted by the local populace with Prussian assistance.
It cannot be said why Ludwig Iversen decided that his future lay in the new antipodean colony of Victoria. But in all likelihood the lure was gold, uncovered in the Pyrenees in July 1851, just a fortnight after Victoria’s disaggregation from New South Wales, at Ballarat a month later, and at Bendigo four months after that. The renown of these new and bountiful goldfields swiftly circled the world. The Victorian census of April 1854 enumerated 67,000 souls in the towns of Castlemaine, Sandhurst, Ballarat, Beechworth, Omeo and Heathcote. By March 1857, this had grown to 166,550; and by April 1861, to 228,181.
Ludwig headed for Heathcote, 110 kilometres from Melbourne on the road to Bendigo. Perhaps he knew someone there, for by 1861 there were 27,000 Germans in Australia, 10,000 of them in Victoria with some 6000 on the goldfields. Whatever the case, culture shock must have been vivid. Heathcote had been a fashionable destination during the rush’s first jostling surge. After gold’s discovery there in January 1853, its 400 original inhabitants had been overrun by 20,000 ambitious interlopers. At its zenith, the town had boasted seven churches and fifty hotels. Quartz mining had now given it a second lease on life and, to the general environment of extravagance, lawlessness and alcoholic dissipation, a classically-trained violinist from Schleswig-Holstein would have seemed an incongruous addition.
Heathcote was no stranger to grisly murder and violent crime. In March 1861, the case of Henry Cooley, proprietor of a refreshment tent en route to the diggings, was briefly talk of the colony. When police questioned him after his wife’s mysterious disappearance, Cooley pleaded ignorance. But it was not long before her charred remains were discovered, eliciting from Cooley the admission that he had accidentally slain her with an axe blade while wood-chopping and tried in his grief-stricken dysphoria to incinerate the corpse. So convincing was Cooley’s remorse in the dock that jurors were half-inclined to acquit him, but he ultimately went to the gallows.
Five months later, three bushrangers invaded the McIvor Inn, trussed its occupants, and went on an alimentary spree: mutton chops and two dozen duck eggs washed down with six bottles of champagne, a bottle of brandy and copious quantities of ale. Though they melted away after relieving the captives of their valuables, one was identified in a Melbourne music hall three weeks later and also hanged.
Some Germans became renowned on the goldfields: Fredrick Vern from Hanover was one of Eureka Stockade’s principal incendiaries and had a hefty price placed on his head when he slipped from sight after its bloody climax. Others were exceptionally lucky: Bernard Holtermann from Hamburg discovered the world’s largest specimen of reef gold—a 286 kilogram whopper called ‘Holtermann’s Nugget’—and devoted the balance of his years to indulging an enthusiasm for wet-plate photography and fostering a vast pictorial archive. Ludwig Iversen, however, became neither famous nor fortunate. No more details survive of his auriferous achievements than a remark by one of his obituarists: ‘He was not favoured by fortune in his mining adventures.’
He did, however, marry. Mary Ann Elizabeth Lipson Carpenter de Pomeroy, a Southampton housemaid, arrived in Melbourne aboard the Theresa on 28 October 1863, one of 184 ‘government immigrants’: women constituted only a third of the goldfields’ population, and authorities were anxious to redress the imbalance. She found employment with an E. Nicholson of St Kilda, then six months later with a John Perry of Heathcote, and on 20 July 1864 married Ludwig Iversen. Photographs show Ludwig as a somewhat stern figure, gaze sharpened by small spectacles, downward turn of his mouth almost obscured by a luxuriant moustache; Mary Ann bears an altogether softer expression, her head at a bashful tilt, fine features framed by dangling braids.
The couple soon set out for South Australia, purchasing an allotment in Greenock on the periphery of the Barossa Valley where their first son Thomas Louis was born on 28 April 1865. The attractions were obvious: the valley was Australia’s largest German settlement, established a quarter of a century earlier by Lutheran refugees round the towns of Klemzig and Hahndorf. Gold fixation leeched, Ludwig set up as a land and commission agent, auctioneer and valuer; the same career that his son Harry and grandson Jack would also follow.
To outsiders, the Barossa of the period was like ‘a little corner of Germany wrapped in cotton wool and deposited in Australia’. Certainly, Lutheranism predominated, and there were strong German-language newspapers like Tanunda Deutsche Zeitung and Australische Zeitung, while the stunning news of Germany’s unification in January 1871 with Wilhelm I of Prussia as emperor occasioned a euphoric parade in Tanunda. Within the community, however, many more frictions and fissures existed. Lutheranism was divided by differing degrees of doctrinal dogmatism, the German language was in decline, and the original generations of Protestant dissenters were being diluted by emigrants of more assimilationist tendencies. Ludwig Iversen, in fact, could be regarded as exemplary of this type. His religious beliefs were ecumenical—though he and his wife listed themselves as Anglican on their marriage certificates, their first three children were baptised by Lutheran pastors—and he suffered no pangs about anglicising his name at the time to Louis Iverson. All six of the children Mary Ann bore at Greenock, including two who died in infancy, bore the new spelling of the surname.
Louis Iverson became accepted as an upstanding community figure. Locals entrusted him, for instance, with the management of the Greenock telegraph, which he ran from his residence. His interest in music was rekindled. A community history cites him as ‘a dynamic personality’ and ‘secretary and organiser of many public activities’ and accompanist on violin and piano at ‘many of the local concerts of the time’. When he left the village after twelve years with wife and four children—his activities as a telegraphist having ceased with the opening of a new post office—he was intent on putting his training in Vienna to good use. Arriving about 1881 in Albury in New South Wales, on the border with Victoria, he promptly posted newspaper advertisements: ‘L. IVERSON, PROFESSOR OF MUSIC. Applications received at the Offices of the Border Post and Banner. PIANOS TUNED.’
It was a late career change-Louis was in his late fifties-but one entered into con brio. His reputation was as a talented and diligent instructor; something of a martinet, in fact, noted for rapping errant piano pupils over the knuckles with a ruler when their fingers faltered. He and his teenage daughter Therese gave a number of public recitals. He also fathered two more children. Christina Dorothea, born in June 1882, died in infancy. William Henry, born on 15 January 1885, was Jack Iverson’s father.
Harry Iverson’s birth certificate makes melancholy reading. In the column reserved for ‘previous issue’, the notation reads: ‘2 males living, 2 females living, 2 males dead, 1 female dead’. Losing three children before the age of three must have tried Louis severely, and further tragedy was in store on 19 March 1886 when his wife died. She was forty-two. Official cause of death is ‘strangolated herine’ (sic), though Harry would tell his own children she had died from the effects of being hit by a swing. Louis was sixty with five children in his care ranging from Thomas Louis, twenty, to Harry, fourteen months. Thomas had been working for four years with Albury merchants T. H. Mate & Co., but the four others depended on the income of a provincial music teacher. It may be, indeed, that the family was in somewhat straitened circumstances. Louis certainly met his wife’s death with severe practicality: she was buried the day she died, without a headstone.
The Iversons remained in Albury another couple of years before Louis enjoyed a lucky break. The centenary of British settlement in Australia was to be marked by an ambitious international fair at Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Buildings, built and baptised for a similar event eight years before. The Centennial Exhibition was intended to be even grander and gaudier than this earlier spectacle: illuminated by the modern miracle of electricity, brimming with artefacts of progress from telephones to torpedoes, and featuring a giant scale model constructed entirely from champagne bottles of the incomplete Eiffel Tower. From Louis’s perspective, however, the festival’s cultural lining was significant. He was one of a host of musicians recruited for what amounted to Australia’s first symphony orchestra, under the direction of the world’s most celebrated conductor: Englishman Frederic Cowen, who had just succeeded Sir Arthur Sullivan as head of the London Philharmonic Society.
No expense was spared marshalling the Centennial Exhibition Orchestra. Cowen’s stipend for six months was a princely £5000, while his orchestra consisted of no fewer than seventy-three musicians: Louis Iverson—who brought Therese, his second daughter Toma and Harry with him while Thomas Louis and Charles remained in Albury—became one of fifteen first violins. Nonetheless, the orchestra fully earned its keep, playing 263 concerts between opening day 1 August 1888 and closing day 31 January 1889, often with the assistance of a choir of 700 voices; ‘an astonishing programme,’ believed historian Geoffrey Serie, ‘which might never have been equalled anywhere’.
Its piece de resistance was The Centennial Cantata, a grandiose orchestral and choral vision of Australian settlement humming with progressive sentiments (’See the spires of the great city gleam/Is it all but the dream of a dream?’). But of longer-term cultural significance was its introduction to the colony of symphonies by composers such as Schumann, Schubert and Brahms, and the first operas by Wagner heard since a Melbourne production of Lohengrin in 1877.
Cowen and his orchestra were judged a success, though Wagner was at first insufficiently euphonious for colonial ears. ‘I learned to be a Wagnerite,’ commented the novelist and society belle Ada Cambridge, ‘after several unsuccessful attempts’. Cowen himself remembered the colonists’ enthusiasm with a mixture of humour and patrician condescension:
After a performance of my oratorio ‘Ruth’, a friend of mine asked a rich squatter how much he liked the work to which he replied: ‘My dear friend, it was simply lovely! It reminded me all the while of weaning time among my sheep; first the old ewe (meaning the contralto) got up and said: "Baa!" Then the old ram (the tenor) got up and answered: "Baa! Baa!" Then all the lambs behind the fences (the choir) cried: "Baa! Baa! Baa!" You tell Cowen to come to my place and I’ll show him how musical the sheep are.’
The Exhibition itself, meanwhile, was judged an egregious flop. Having been budgeted to cost £25,000, its expenses mushroomed to £400,000. Having been intended as a showcase of the world’s wares and wonders, its otiose flourishes overwhelmed human scale. Melbourne could, however, afford such profligacy. The land boom was at its apogee, Melbourne at its most ‘marvellous’. Made rich by gold and populous by immigrants, the city throbbed with the industry of 3000 factories and the inventiveness of many more speculators. The climate of squandermania was embodied around the time of the Centennial Exhibition by the syndicate which offered £300,000 for the partially erected St Paul’s Cathedral in order to replace it with an office block. They only narrowly failed.
There seemed something for everyone in this most cosmopolitan of cities: splendid opera, first-rate theatre, fine dining. With Germans now representing the colony’s largest non-British minority, Louis could choose from no fewer than three German associations: the German Club, the Turn Verein and the Tivoli. And, having been part of Australia’s most distinguished orchestra, he found his services as a teacher in demand. After the Exhibition closed, Louis became chief music instructor at Kew’s prestigious Xavier College. He spent four years there, and the respect he enjoyed is reflected in the value of the gift he received on departure-three volumes of the complete works of Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven-and its inscription: ‘To Herr Iverson as a token of favours continually and cheerfully rendered. New Year’s Day 1893.’
By the time Louis’s tenure at Xavier ended, however, Melbourne had changed altogether. The thriftless 1880s had given way to the austere 1890s with the collapse of real estate prices and an attendant banking panic. There were more than 600 bankruptcies, private compositions and arranged liquidations in 1892 alone. Ada Cambridge applauded the purifying effects of the city’s swift reversal of fortune: ‘A better example of the vulgarising effects of wealth, and of the refining effects of being without it, was never packed in a neater compass.’ Others suffered severely: more than 50,000 left the city, including in due course the Iversons. The Albury Border Post in November 1896 noted Louis’s reopening for business in Olive Street, abetted by Therese and Toma, accepting pupils ‘for Piano, Violin, Theory of Music and Cultivation of the Voice’.
Though reunited with all his children after eight years, Louis was not destined to remake his mark in the border town. At about 7pm on 13 January 1897, shortly after finishing a violin lesson with a local pupil, he suffered a stroke. He was found ‘in a state of complete unconsciousness’ by one of his sons, who summoned a doctor called Andrews, but died forty-eight hours later. The Albury Daily News and Wodonga Chronicle proposed overwork as the cause: ‘Though advanced in years, Mr Iverson had always devoted himself arduously to his duties as a professor of music and the mental strain was no doubt responsible for the fusion which resulted in his death.’
The passing of its patriarch seems to have had a marked impact on the family Iverson. In a copy of an obituary notice pasted in the music books that had been Louis’s parting gift from Xavier, all references to Albury were fastidiously deleted, apparently by their inheritor Toma. Was this a gesture of annoyance at having been dragged back to the provinces after the city’s heady sensations? Or did Toma’s brothers nurse a sense of grievance about being left behind in the first place? Whatever the case, the children dispersed speedily after their brief reunion. Thomas Louis remained in Albury, marrying in April 1899, as did Therese, persevering as a musical instructor. Charles headed for Sydney, where he married in September 1901, and was joined presently by Toma. Harry, meanwhile, spent time in both households, but in neither was he happy. In his mid-teens, he detached from his family permanently and irrevocably.
For Harry, the trauma of his mother’s death in infancy and his father’s death a day before his twelfth birthday must have been formative. Perhaps he was the unidentified son who discovered Louis in the aftermath of his stroke; certainly he hardly spoke of his family in later life. We do know that a serious and unbridgeable rift opened between Harry on one hand and Thomas Louis and Therese on the other, but beyond that Harry seldom ventured. His surviving daughter Ruth says: ‘My mother would say: "Daddy will tell you if he wishes." But he never did.’
Harry was also coy about his young adulthood. He referred proudly to ‘making his own way in the world’, but never explained how. Family lore has it that, like his own father, he spent time panning gold around Bendigo. He also commenced a law degree at Melbourne University, though he did not graduate; study would have been expensive for someone of modest means. When Harry first appears on electoral rolls in 1910-having passed the voting age of twenty-one-his residence is listed as East Melbourne’s Gipps Street, his occupation ‘manager’. But of what, we cannot say. We know only that he trained and practised as an accountant: a popular standby for bright young men of the period unable to afford tertiary fees but prepared to attend night schools or undertake home tuition. Young Harry appears in photographs as a sturdy figure of firm chin and determined mien, smart in dress and straight of spine. He would have impressed those he met as a young man making good. And he seems to have impressed one family in particular.
The Whites were among the most distinguished families in the settlement of Romsey, about sixty-five kilometres from Melbourne, then a pleasant and prosperous rural enclave of almost 4000 to which many wealthy urbanites retreated at weekends. William White had arrived in Australia in October 1854, acquired a splendid property which he called Rochford Hall, and opened the area’s first general store. Under the catchy names of The Hall of Commerce, The Universal Provider and finally The Full and Plenty Store, it served the district for eighty years. White became the archetype of a settler cum civic father: keeping the register of births, deaths and marriages, planting the elms still lining Romsey’s Main Road, and running the local Romsey Examiner.
When he left the district, one son got the store, another the newspaper. The latter, Henry Charles White, became shire secretary in 1909, and continued in the role when Romsey incorporated the neighbouring shires of Lancefield and Springfield. Henry and his wife Emma Sophia ran a severe household: despite her family’s circumstances, their daughter
Edith Joyce made do while growing up with used bottles for dolls. But when she met young Harry Iverson around 1911 or 1912, he must have impressed her parents with his prospects and his undeviating attentiveness as a suitor: while courting, he would cycle from East Melbourne to Romsey every Saturday with a box of chocolates in the basket over his handlebars.
That the bride’s father was also proprietor of the local newspaper means that we are blessed by a detailed account of the nuptials at St Paul’s Church on 17 September 1913. The Romsey Examiner usually devoted no more than a terse paragraph to local marriages; on the wedding of his daughter, Henry White lavished almost a column of tiny type itemising every wedding gift. To the service conducted by her uncle, the Reverend Charlton Brazier, the new Mrs Edith Iverson wore an ivory satin charmeuse with court train, overdressed in Limerick lace, a handsome net and point brace bridal veil adorned with a wreath of orange blossoms and a shower bouquet of white flowers. Harry’s gift to Edith was an arctic fox fur, Edith’s to Harry a dressing case, while the seventy-seven guests chipped in everything from a painted table centre to an aquamarine necklet.
Harry’s best man was his friend Frank Carolan—an estate agent in Carlton’s Lygon Street with his father’s firm Carolan Bros—accompanied by Mary Hayes, his intended. Otherwise the guest list was drawn almost exclusively from the bride’s side, the Examiner referring vaguely to the groom’s relatives being ‘too far away to attend’; a euphemistic description, one suspects, of the abiding family rift. After a reception at the local Mechanics Institute, the happy couple headed ‘by motor’ to the coastal resort of Lorne for their honeymoon.
Harry and Ede Iverson’s first matrimonial home was at 10 Langridge Street, Middle Park, a residence called Carinya. It was while there on 13 June 1914 that their first child was born: a daughter Mary Joyce, to be known in the family as Joy. As families in those days seldom stopped at one, the Iversons then sought a larger property: a red brick cottage at 1 Longmore Street, St Kilda. And it was here on 27 July 1915 that their second child was born: a son, John Bryan. He would be known to the cricket world as Jack.