FROM HORSHAM THEY TOOK THE TRAIN to Stawell (pronounced “Stall”), about forty miles to the southeast. Mrs. Clemens and Clara went directly to the Commercial Hotel while Clemens proceeded to Town Hall, where he was welcomed by a delegation of dignitaries, and where later that night he performed.
Today the Hall Keeper, Mr. Graham Rickard, a handsome, middle-aged man with a trimmed beard and a military posture, shows us what’s left of the upstairs auditorium where Clemens performed. Now, with its ceiling lowered, the great room has been converted into offices, and there is no long view to the wooden stage, slightly canted toward the audience, to which Mr. Rickard guides us. Clemens would have been accustomed to a “raked” stage, though it was unnecessary for his solo performances. The angled platform helped those watching from a level floor to see players in the rear. By the time of his tour, flat stages had already begun replacing raked ones, to facilitate the use of free-standing, three-dimensional props, so Clemens probably performed on both kinds. Even today, especially in London, performers can experience the challenge of adjusting to an angled stage — more of an issue for dancers than for actors — and set designers can confront the problem of making props that stand on a slanted floor appear level.
It was probably in Stawell, before her father’s performance that evening, that Clara took a walk in the country and found a sheep lying on its side. Convinced it was dying, she walked back to town, where she bought ether and learned how to use it to put the creature out of its misery. Fortunately, on her way back, she met the owner of the sheep, who explained that once a sheep falls down at this time of year, it cannot rise by itself because its wool is too heavy. After he hauled the sheep to its feet, she reported, it “toddled off, contented with the world.”
The next day the Clemenses visited the nearby Great Western winery Holding lighted candles, they descended into the underground cellars, where, by flickering light, they saw 120,000 bottles of champagne in various stages of maturation. The cellars, hacked out of granite by out-of-work gold miners, provided a constant, perfect temperature of fifteen degrees centigrade. The winery, still in operation, has become the world’s second-largest producer of champagne (the largest is in Spain). Its tunnels or “drives,” greatly extended since the Clemenses’ visit, now hold two million bottles of premium champagne. Like the Clemenses, you can descend from the heat of the day into the cool cellars, see the hewers’ pickax marks, and learn about the méthode champenoise. But unless you are a distinguished visitor, you are unlikely to be accompanied by an entourage like that of the Clemenses’, which included the Minister of Mines, the Mayor of Stawell, other local politicos, and the winery’s proprietors, Mr. and Mrs. Hans Irvine. Today, even distinguished visitors will not be guided by the owner, now a public corporation.
On their way back to Stawell, the Clemenses stopped at a clump of about twenty huge, rounded boulders in a grove of gum trees. These rocks or tors, formed eons ago by the erosion of a granite mass, are called the Sisters or the Three Sisters. They were probably named for the three daughters of the Levi family, early settlers who once made their home near the rocks. It is said that the sisters’ descendants still live in Stawell.
The Clemenses would be surprised if they could see the boulders today. The rocks now display a psychedelically bright palimpsest of spray-painted names and slogans. Mr. Rickard’s father, Donald Rickard, a seventy-eight-year-old local historian, tells us that the rocks have been painted as long as he can remember, although the spray-painting is relatively new. According to a contemporary photograph, the rocks were still unmarked at the time of the Clemenses’ visit.
Another rock painting can now be seen in the area. The Clemenses did not inspect it because it was unknown to Europeans. There were only rumors that Aboriginal paintings could be found near Stawell. It was not until 1957 that members of the Stawell Field Naturalists Club discovered, on a hill about seven miles southwest of town, a crude white drawing of Bunjil, an ancestor-god venerated by Aboriginal peoples from northwestern and central Victoria. Known as a good spirit who never hurt a human or an animal, he created the land, brought it rain, grass, and roots, and conveyed to the people their laws and customs. When he completed his work, he left the earth to live in the sky as a star. His image, next to the figure of two dogs, smiles inside the hollow of a great granite boulder. Most of the graffiti that appeared there after Europeans learned of the picture’s existence have been removed. A wire grill now protects the drawing.
The boulder sits with others on a rise. If you stand with your back to the hollow you can see the gum trees that dot the hill’s slope and, beyond, the plain and the mountains. In the late afternoon of a warm spring day, with the low, slanting light casting shadows on the daisy-spangled grass, you will hear nothing but birdsong and the susurration of leaves.
The Djab Wurrung people once hunted, fished, and gathered from the lakes, swamps, and land below, obtaining an abundant, nutritious diet without too much effort. But their way of life had vanished by the time of the Clemenses’ visit in 1895. About fifty years before, Europeans began to move enormous flocks and herds into the area, displacing the kangaroo and emu hunted by the Djab Wurrung. The original inhabitants fought the intruders as long as they could. Those Aborigines who survived the settlers’ harsh reprisals were forced into missions, where they lived a generally degraded existence. Unable to pursue their ancient way of life, they lost much of their traditional skills and knowledge.
It is a pity that the Clemenses could not have visited the Bunjil Cave. They met no Aborigines while they were in Australia, but Clemens seemed fascinated by what he heard and read about these “marvelously interesting creatures,” as he called them. The Aborigine’s “place in art,” he wrote in Following the Equator, “is not to be classified with savage art at all, but on a plane two degrees above it and one degree above the lowest plane of civilized art. To be exact, his place in art is between Botticelli and Du Maurier.” The latter was a contemporary British illustrator of books and a satiric caricaturist for Punch; he is perhaps best known today as the author of Trilby. “That is to say, [the Aborigine] could not draw as well as Du Maurier, but better than Botticelli.” Clemens might have elevated Aboriginal art to an even higher plane had he foreseen the high prices that their work fetches today and the flourishing market in fakes that such prices and the naïveté of collectors have stimulated. Today’s Aboriginal art includes work based on traditional motifs and designs as well as work reflecting nontraditional influences.
If Aboriginal drawing impressed Clemens, other Aboriginal abilities amazed him. He was astounded by their storied feats of tracking humans and game and by their skill in throwing the boomerang and the weet-weet, a two-ounce “fat wooden cigar with its butt-end fastened to a flexible twig,” which is flung underhanded onto the ground, on which it skips repeatedly, “like the flat stone which a boy sends skating over the water.”
Aborigines could not have been “such unapproachable trackers and boomerangers and weet-weeters,” he wrote in Following the Equator, were there not “a large distribution of acuteness” among them. He blamed “race-aversion” for “the low-rate intellectual reputation which they bear and have borne this long time in the world’s estimation of them.” During the Clemenses’ first week in Australia, a newspaper article claimed that an Aborigine had applied for a job as a reporter with a Sydney newspaper. According to the report, the applicant was “so smart and generally competent” that the manager would have hired him had he not feared a revolt from his staff.
If Clemens respected the skills and intelligence of “those naked, skinny aboriginals,” he nonetheless criticized them. “They were lazy — always lazy Perhaps that was their trouble. It is a killing defect. Surely they could have invented and built a competent house, but they didn’t. And they could have invented and developed the agricultural arts, but they didn’t. They went naked and houseless, and lived on fish and grubs and worms and wild fruits, and were just plain savages, for all their smartness.”
Today we admire what Clemens and his contemporaries viewed as laziness: the ability to live harmoniously with nature and to maintain health with a minimum of work. It was typical of Aborigines, as with many other Stone Age peoples, to spend no more than four or five hours a day on average in gathering, hunting, and preparing food, fashioning tools, securing and maintaining shelters, and performing the other tasks required for their subsistence. They had ample time for recreation, spiritual pursuits, and the transmission of their skills, complex rituals, and rich mythology.
For 50,000 years, Australian Aborigines maintained their ways of life, until the first British settlements at the end of the eighteenth century. In the Australia that the Clemenses found, these ways of life had, for the most part, been destroyed or diluted. The number of Aborigines had been markedly reduced by the theft of their land, by exposure to European diseases and to alcohol, by heartbreak and humiliation, and by outright murder.
Although Clemens saw the Aborigines as “lazy,” he saw the settlers’ treatment of them as abominable. In Following the Equator he cited the story of a settler who feared an attack from Aborigines who had surrounded his property. The settler negotiated with them and offered them a “Christmas pudding” that all could eat and which would satisfy the hunger of all. He distributed the pudding, laced with sugar and arsenic, and the Aborigines ate it. “There are many humorous things in the world,” Clemens wrote, “among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”