THE SUNDAY ON WHICH THE WARRIMOO ANCHORED OFFSHORE was a “day of public humiliation and prayer,” proclaimed by the Government of New South Wales. The colony was enduring its worst drought in memory No doubt, argued one editorial writer, periods of drought followed fixed laws. “So far, however, [Man] hasn’t learned them, partly, perhaps, because he devotes so much time to football, cricket, horse-racing, organising Chinese missions, arguing about creeds, splitting hairs of theology, drinking and other unintellectual pursuits.”
One hundred years later, football, cricket, and horseracing are as popular as ever in Australia, where per capita beer consumption is perhaps the third highest in the world, and if Australians no longer send missions to China, there are churches in Australia that cater to Chinese immigrants. The Central Baptist Church near Sydney’s Chinatown offers services in Cantonese.
On that Sunday of public humiliation and prayer, Canon Taylor, preaching at Sydney’s St. Andrew’s Cathedral, declared that the drought was divine punishment that could be removed only by national repentance. The next day, September 16, 1895, when the Clemenses set foot on Australian soil, rain fell in various parts of the colony Pipes from the roof of the Colonial Secretary’s buildings overflowed, converting the secretary’s long room into a reservoir and deluging the office of the Railway Department’s cashier. The best part of the rain, however, fell in the adjoining colony of Victoria, whose residents were enjoined by a newspaper editorial not to feel self-righteous on that account, “for the Scriptures tell us that rain, when it does descend, descends equally upon the just and the unjust.”
Like the Clemenses, we arrived on a day when rain first fell after months of drought. But a few days later the sky is blue, as Alice and I walk to the New South Wales State Archives. We’re looking for references to Captain Arundell. Did he sail again with his steamship company, or did the directors sack him, as Clemens feared?
We find the Warrimoo’s inward passenger list. Passengers are listed for saloon class and second class only, so Clemens’s story about a child born in steerage at the International Date Line, on its face a tall tale, is confirmed as just that. We find fifteen passengers listed in saloon class, including three Clemenses and a Mr. Smith. In Following the Equator, Clemens tells us that “the brightest passenger in the ship, and the most interesting and felicitous talker,” was a young Canadian. He was the scion of a rich and powerful family who would have helped him pursue a distinguished career if only he could stay sober. Instead, they were dispatching him to the end of the earth, where he was less likely to disgrace them and where they would send him a small monthly allowance. He would become what was called at the time a “remittance man.” In a journal entry from Melbourne, Clemens mentions seeing many such unfortunates and then refers to one by name, Smith. Here he is, listed with the Clemenses and Mr. and Mrs. Chase, the Bostonian mother and son whose trip to the Finger Lakes took them around the world.
Captain Arundell has signed the manifest in a large, confident, well-formed hand, a signature as handsome as his person. If he is under a cloud, his writing does not betray it. But his name does not appear on the lists of incoming vessels for the first four months of 1896. Perhaps he took a long leave, or perhaps I missed his name.
Leaving the archives, we savor the flash and dazzle of downtown Sydney. Skyscrapers, set at unexpected angles to one another along the narrow, winding streets, reflect one another in their glass façades. They also reflect massive brownstone buildings from Clemens’s day. The Australia Hotel no longer survives even as a reflection, but a librarian told us that its bar counter was salvaged and now stands in the Marble Bar of the Hilton Hotel. Alas, even librarians make mistakes. The Marble Bar, according to a plaque, comes from the Adams Hotel, which occupied the site on which the Hilton now stands. So the Australia’s forty-foot counter and its unrivaled display of glass have gone forever. They have joined the experienced bartenders as well as their patrons who, like Clemens, once drank whiskey cocktails there at noon.
It was probably whiskey that Clemens drank at the Athenaeum Club on September 18, 1895, two days after he had stepped off the Warrimoo. One hundred members of the club entertained him at dinner. In response to a toast in his honor, Clemens gave a speech that concluded with the sentiment, “Advance Australia.” This slogan, referring to the proposed federation of Australasian colonies, was associated with Sir Henry Parkes, a principal promoter of federation. Among those who responded to Clemens’s speech was Sir Henry, who presented Clemens with his book of poems, published that year.
Sir Henry seemed not at all disturbed by the controversy aroused by Clemens’s endorsement of free trade. Later he entertained the three Clemenses at lunch. Mrs. Clemens, writing to her sister Mrs. Crane, reported that he had lost his second wife about three months before. That wife was not received by society because she had been Parkes’s mistress. Upon his second marriage, his daughters from his first wife left home, but they returned to care for their eighty-year-old father and his young children after their stepmother died. Mrs. Clemens guessed that the oldest daughter was fifty and that the small child who was brought into the drawing room was about two and a half. At first she thought it was the old man’s grandchild, but it turned out to be his child.
A little more than a month after the Athenaeum Club dinner, Sir Henry horrified many Australians and amused others by marrying his twenty-two-year-old housemaid. “He said he could have married more advantageously from a worldly point of view,” Mrs. Clemens informed her sister, “but he preferred to marry for love.” His middle-aged daughters once again flounced out of their father’s house.
Henry Parkes’s career exemplifies the major issues that New South Wales confronted during the nineteenth century, the enormous changes the colony experienced during that time, and the great opportunities it offered to an able man of obscure background. He was born in 1815, a few weeks before the Battle of Waterloo. The son of a fieldworker on the Warwickshire estate of an English grandee, he became premier of New South Wales under the governorship of that nobleman’s son-in-law. When he arrived in Australia in 1839, the interior of the country was largely unknown, and few settlers were brave enough to live far from the coast. In that year, free workers in New South Wales, resentful at competition, succeeded in halting the practice of assigning convicts to settlers, a modified form of slavery. A year later Britain abolished the transportation of convicts.
In a classic example of the law of unintended consequences, these measures created a financial disaster. Britain stopped its subsidies, which had been justified by the colony’s status as a penal settlement, and cheap labor vanished. The Bank of Australia failed. Land values plummeted. Sheep sold at a shilling apiece. The sheep farmers, who constituted the only important industry and who were faced with ruin, agitated for the return of convict transportation and labor. But when these practices were revived in 1849, the fury of the free workers quickly stopped them. Parkes was active in the successful agitation.
But the issue of competition from convict labor would in any case have become unimportant after the discovery of gold two years later. As gold seekers swarmed into the country, convicts became a small proportion of the white population. The new immigrants, mostly energetic, independent men, forwarded the movement for self-government, in which Parkes was active. When a committee of the old legislative council proposed the creation of a hereditary nobility, from which the upper house of the new legislature would be formed, Parkes was a prominent leader of the furious opposition that quashed the plan. First elected to office in 1854, he continued to serve, almost without interruption, as representative, minister, or premier until his defeat in the summer of 1895. By then he had outlived nearly all his colleagues.
Like Clemens,” he was a self-made man from the margins of society Like Clemens, he was both a writer and a master of excoriation. And like Clemens, he was a poor businessman. But unlike Clemens, he neither smoked nor drank nor gambled, nor talked for the sake of talk. One of Parkes’s admirers wrote that “his whole time was so sacredly devoted to the public service that he hesitated even to speak with persons unknown to him, his theory being that it was sheer waste of time to converse with nine men out of ten.” And unlike Clemens, he did not seek wealth. Parkes died a poor man. The Clemenses could not know, as they sat around his table at lunch, that he would be dead in seven months.
In addition to Parkes, other eminent persons entertained the Clemenses in Sydney. The commander of the Australian Naval Station, Admiral Bridge, asked them to tea aboard the warship Orlando, and Lieutenant Governor and Lady Darley invited them to a ball at Government House. A few days later, Clara and Mrs. Clemens attended a luncheon party aboard the admiral’s flagship, which was “gaily decorated with flags and evergreens,” and on which a naval band played for dancing until six in the evening.
So many admirers in Sydney sent flowers to the Clemenses that Clara thought the bouquets seemed to suggest condolence rather than welcome. She remembered that she and her mother worked hard answering the mail, which at times overwhelmed them. Clemens wrote to Rogers from Sydney that he hadn’t a moment’s time that was his own since he arrived. “I don’t know what would become of me but for Mrs. Clemens and Clara; they slave away answering letters for me half the day and night and paying not only their own calls but as many of mine as can be brought within their jurisdiction.” He was, he said, spending as much time as possible perfecting his performances.
Perhaps it was during his first days in Sydney that he created a routine in which he told of his persistent efforts to compose a poem about Australian fauna. “Land of the Ornithorhyncus / Land of the kangaroo / Old ties of heredity link us,” he would begin, and then stop, seemingly stuck. He would start anew, “Land of the fruitful rabbit / Land of the boomerang,” and would falter, confounded again. He would then recite twenty lines of verse, which he had composed while still in British Columbia (in Following the Equator he attributes the poem to a fellow passenger, a learned “naturalist”) — “Come forth from thy oozy couch, / O Ornithorhyncus dear! …” — and would predict that if he could persevere and if his inspiration did not desert him, he would probably complete his masterpiece in another year. He introduced this routine during his third performance in Sydney, two days before he wrote to Rogers. It became such a popular item in his repertoire that advertisements for his performances sometimes noted it.
He wrote to Rogers in bed, “with what seems to be a new carbuncle” halfway between his left knee and ankle. The Clemenses were leaving that afternoon for Melbourne. “We have had a darling time here for a week,” he told Rogers, “and really I am almost in love with the platform again.”