THE ADDITIONAL WEEK spent in Melbourne waiting for his carbuncle to heal forced Clemens to reverse his route. Instead of traveling from Melbourne to Adelaide via small towns in Victoria and then returning to Melbourne directly from Adelaide, he returned to Melbourne through the Victorian country towns. The first of these was Horsham.
Horsham, in the center of endless wheatfields, was one of the smallest venues in which Clemens performed during his world tour. Smythe would probably have skipped this town of 3,000 souls if its citizens, led by an enthusiastic secretary of the Mechanics’ Institute, had not underwritten the performance. They guaranteed Smythe thirty-five pounds, about $3,200 in today’s terms. In effect, Horsham’s citizens, on their own responsibility, invited Mark Twain to entertain them.
The Clemenses stepped onto the Horsham platform at two-thirty in the morning. The secretary of the Mechanics’ Institute and another young man met them and drove them to the White Hart Hotel, gorgeous with cast-iron verandas. In its day the best hotel in town, known for its lofty ceilings and the best stable facilities outside Melbourne, it still operates, although neither stables nor verandas remain. A blown-up page from a history of Horsham, with a photograph of the hotel circa 1895, adorns an inside wall. The text notes that Mark Twain slept there, although if he were to see it today, he might choose more comfortable accommodations in one of the town’s motels, as we have. “Mark Twain?” asks the proprietor of our motel, as if trying to remember where she had heard the name. “Oh yes,” she says, “they named a boat after him at Disneyland.”
Across the way from the Clemenses’ hotel, in front of the London Bank of Australia, was what Clemens described as “a very handsome cottonwood … in opulent leaf, and every leaf perfect.” Today the Commonwealth Bank of Australia stands across the street, shaded by a eucalyptus, neither handsome nor opulent, but large in relation to the other trees on Firebrace Street, still the town’s main drag. The street is broad and brightened by flowers and flowering shrubs, and many handsome turn-of-the-century buildings remain. But those old structures that have escaped fire and the wrecking ball have been remodeled without concern for their original design. A cantilevered portico juts out over the street, breaking the vertical line of a building; only one shop in a row of four preserves the columned cornice that once unified them all; false fronts proliferate above the second story. Architectural mutants and nondescript modern structures have combined to produce an unpleasing streetscape.
At about noon, on a windless, cloudless day of brilliant sunshine, the Clemenses rode out in an open wagon to Longerenong Agricultural College, about eight miles away. “The air was fine and pure and exhilarating,” wrote Clemens about the journey. “If the drive had lasted half a day I think we should not have felt any discomfort, or grown silent or droopy or tired.”
Thomas Kirkland Dow, the principal, drove them out to the college. He was the brother of John Lamont Dow, the former Minister of Lands and Agriculture who had greeted the Clemenses upon their arrival in Melbourne. Like his brother, the college principal was born in Scotland, and like his brother he had fallen into bankruptcy, having speculated unsuccessfully in mining shares. He took over the college in 1890, a year after land prices had collapsed, wool and wheat prices had plummeted, and foreign investment had ebbed. The depression reduced the college’s income from the state and from its agricultural tenants, many of whom were unable to pay their rents. The calamitous drought at the time of the Clemenses’ visit contributed to the distress of the college, which within two years would be forced to close until the middle of the next decade.
Those woes did not prevent Mr. and Mrs. Dow from entertaining the Clemenses at tea, or from presenting candy to Clara and flowers to both women. Clemens toured the college, inspecting the nurseries, which had demonstrated that “all manner of fruits” could be grown in the region, and observing a sophomore class in sheep shearing. Sometimes the students “clipped off a sample of the sheep,” he wrote, “but that is customary with shearers, and they don’t mind it; they don’t even mind it as much as the sheep.”
About forty students were in residence at the time of the Clemenses’ visit. Most were sixteen years old or younger, and most were from urban middle-class homes. Clemens thought it “a strange thing that an agricultural college should have an attraction for city-bred youths, but such is the fact.” Most farmers during the depression were struggling, unable to afford the school’s fees, modest as these were. Large landholders sent their sons to private schools and could teach them to manage properties by means of on-site training. About one-fifth of the pupils came from homes headed by women, who perhaps saw the school as a means for providing a relatively inexpensive, respectable, masculine environment for sons who were hard to control.
It was an environment that represented to Australians of the day the “real” Australia, far from the corrupting influence of the coastal cities where, even then, the overwhelming majority of Australians lived. It is still widely accepted in Australia that farms and ranches and small towns preserve the essential character of this intensely urban country. This is so even though agriculture represents a smaller and smaller component of the nation’s output. Farm incomes are falling, farm debt is rising, rural populations are declining, small-town businesses are collapsing, and government services to rural areas are contracting. Nonetheless, an annual agricultural exhibition, the Royal Melbourne Show, advertises itself this year as the place “where the real Australia comes to town.”
For most of its history, the Longerenong college was essentially a boys’ boarding school. Today it is a tertiary institution, part of the Victorian College of Agriculture and Horticulture, affiliated with the University of Melbourne. Although its students still learn from practical work on the farm, the college has seen some impressive changes. A graduate, returning in the 1920s, commented that by introducing electricity and hot water, the college was spoiling its students for living on the farm, where they would never find such conveniences. In his day, pupils had studied by candlelight. When the first tractor was introduced in the 1920s, at a time when Clydesdales provided most of the nation’s motive power, students were not permitted to use it without supervision. In later years, they could not take out horses without supervision. But even at the time of the college’s founding, the agricultural and pastoral industries of Victoria had seen great changes. Fifty years before, there were no shearing, reaping, or binding machines, but “only the shear in the shed and the sickle in the field,” according to an editorial that appeared in another Victorian town, a month before the Clemenses’ visit to Horsham.
The Clemenses drove away from the college through the long avenue of gums and pepper trees that the first students had planted, and onto the road to Horsham, where that night Clemens gave one of his best performances to date. He had recovered from his carbuncle, and the townspeople themselves had invited him. Mrs. Clemens, writing to her daughter Susy, commented that he had “never talked to a more enthusiastic audience.” The young man who sat next to her “began to pound his sides as if troubled with stitches in them and turning to me said, ‘Well if it is all as funny as this I shall die!’“