Sketch 4
In which my fire burns low

I HAVE BEEN TAKING every opportunity to ride into the countryside on my pony, following the new roads up through the range of hills to the north and likewise through a range of hills down towards the south. As it is not so comfortable to travel about in the rainy season, I make my forays in the warmer months, with a sandwich in my saddlebag for day excursions as well as my sketch pad; or with what is called a swag, a rolled up blanket and a sheet of canvas, and my gun of course for chance provisions so that I can camp out whenever and wherever night overtakes me.

I have my dogs for company, Darkie, my big black dog, and Gyp, a tawny lurcher, bounding and dim-witted as lurchers tend to be, and an inveterate scavenger. And I have a consoling fire in the evenings, and the great vault of blazing stars above, and the beauty of the moon to distract me from my solitariness. In the day, the vast radiant skies, and the splendour of sunrise and sunset. In the summer months the land becomes very dry, indeed one might say the plains bake hard, and even the hills look drab. In the full heat of the day the one sign of life, the little brown grasshoppers, flicking up from clumps of dried grass as you pass by. Sometimes swirling columns of dust start up in the midst of all that stillness and then die away too, and all lies tranced under the sun again.

Crossing the plains I see from time to time sheep tracks and cattle tracks and kangaroo pads and cart trails wandering through the scrub, wavering and meeting and separating from each other and going all over the place, literally. They do not go anywhere. There is as yet no destination for them; they make no narrative, or only the very rudiments of one.

This is not a colourful time of the year. It is a bleached time. Even the bright blue of the skies drains to a parchment white. But the very brilliance of the light creates something like an aura in the gullies and gorges, the heat ricocheting off the broken rock faces and the beds of stones in the dried-up water courses. It is in trying conditions like these that my thoughts have been drifting back to the great soft greenness of the South Downs, behind old Portsmouth, or taking my guns and dog with me out into the fields towards a charming and remote old inn called The World’s End. The original publican there evidently had not heard of South Australia at the time.

Staring into the glowing red embers of my campfire, my thoughts have been bending towards Portsmouth for other reasons too. My sister died about a year after I arrived here, though the news took a painfully long time to reach me. And then my mother also passed away, six months later, and that distressing news was also a long time in reaching me, too long. But most painfully astonishing of all, my father remarried in just a matter of weeks after that loss, and has in very short order begotten another child. The indecent haste of all this, even though I only found out about these matters well after each event, has been much of a shock to me; even, I confess, to a Hamlet-like bitterness.

Somehow the delay in learning of these things, the slow dragging-out of those sad matters contrasted with my father’s grubby impatience, makes his activity seem all the more unnatural. Or perhaps all too coarsely natural. Either way, distasteful. I have written a polite note of congratulation, and I doubt that its cool formality will surprise him. He will not miss that; but then he will have been too full of congratulating himself to need a further contribution from me. Everything is now changed for me back there. It makes my eyes hot to think of what can no longer be for me my family home. I have no desire to return to any of it.

This is not what I have understood as detachment, not at all.

And poking some more pieces of wood into the fire, I am thinking of the pathos of last Christmas here in the colony. We are displaced Englishmen at this furthest reach of the world. Except of course for the Germans who first settled further up the Torrens valley at a neat little settlement they have called Klemzig, in memory of their own Prussian homeland, building and whitewashing their earthen cottages and planting vines around them, and crops and vegetables and fruit trees in the cleared fields behind their hamlet—a different kind of hamlet this time.

They no doubt have made a point of maintaining their own customs in their trim little thatched dwellings, along with their own religious observances. They seem rather more tenacious of their own old ways than we are, or less concerned with how inappropriate are customs from the other side of the world. They are a close-knit community. We are all to some degree strangers to each other here, acquaintances rather than kith and kin. We lack the friends and neighbours of long standing to greet at Yuletide, we do not gather around a festive board surrounded by those nearest and dearest to us. Indeed, Christmas here is so distant from our old English customs as to make a mockery of its celebration, or possibly to make the celebration a mockery of it. No drawing close to the cheerful blazing log here (though the reflection prompts me to kick my own glowing branch from a dead gum tree), no games and riddles. Our whole invention has been of ways to escape the heat, which mostly means resorting to bottles of claret cooling in a washing tub appropriated for the day. Instead of a roast suckling pig, we share a haunch of kangaroo. There are as far as I know, no traditional old songs celebrating the Christmas kangaroo; nor are there likely to be, I will wager. The Christmas season here is just too much of an oddity to acquire any of those mellow associations to which, in the older hemisphere, we attach ourselves.

I have also been thinking how odd it is, my thoughts wavering around like the slow thin plume of smoke from my fire, more a shimmer than a colour, that so many of our people here have short, indeed monosyllabic surnames. Briggs, for example. Duff. Eyre. Gepp. Gosse. Hailes. Hill. Hutt. Mann. Pitt. Sturt. Wright. Not to mention all the customary Browns, Smiths, Clarks and Jones. Where are the Fazackerlys and Featherstonehaughs, the Fotheringills and Hickinbothams, the Polkinghornes and Throckmortons? We are to be a people of blunted nomenclature it seems, and we are perhaps acquiring unawares a defining character of our own, even while we yearn for the impossible, to continue the character we left behind us. We are taken up with nostalgia when we might be better served by attending to what is in fact before us. We name places quite inappropriately after the familiar towns and villages of our past; though I have to admit those offer a better resonance than the baldly functional, like Mount Lofty, or Mount Distance, or Prospect, or the highly ludicrous Dry Creek.

Port Lincoln honours where Captain Flinders had come from; there is no point of actual resemblance that I know of, and it marks as far away in the world as he had come from his birthplace. The name marks his separation from his home. So in another way does Burnside, hardly a romantic construction by the resident Scot. It is a combination of guarded sentiment and pragmatism, for that name is in fact a kind of signpost. Though of course it is nothing of the sort, as it could be claimed of pretty much anywhere. The Greenhill road is a misnomer, or was when I saw it. These names all tend to tell us what we don’t have, rather than what we can celebrate.

And contrariwise, still thinking about the naming of things, in what was promoted as a land of opportunity there is much that is inopportune. The naming of Adelaide was in honour of the queen, as it was then thought. But King William having died untimely, and before the colony had been officially proclaimed, a new queen came to the throne, and you might have thought the appropriate change could have been made. Alas, not so: the as then non-existent town was already being carved up and sold off from a sheet of paper, long before anybody actually sailed to settle it, and all those privileged with both the information and the money had a title with a place name already on it.

In any case, at her ascendancy the young queen shifted her own name from Alexandrina to Victoria. Captain Strutt as I like to think him (contributing my own mite towards the renovation of names) unluckily named the large lake at the end of his discovered river after her previous name. Again, you might think that could have been tidied up too. The large swamp which has recently been found adjacent to it has been named Lake Albert, which is appropriately companionable though not in the least flattering. Time will reveal whether there is an accidental aptness.

And for all these changes and uncertainties, the land itself is utterly oblivious to it all, absolutely indifferent to such quaint enthusiasms, and hugely unchanging.

While the naming of villages about Adelaide seemingly announces expanding settlement, the little German settlement has already been largely abandoned. Those people have decamped, to form a new village, another new village when the previous one was not much more than four years old. That hardly meets the sentimental requirements of Goldsmith’s poem, yet there is our history in the making, the beginning of associations, the question of departures. If the first beginning is abandoned so swiftly to make way for another, does that not in effect cancel out the very notion of a beginning? Whatever was begun has been stopped short in its tracks. It seems to me that with all these commencements and recommencements we see a repetition of my own ridiculous sequence of deferred arrivals. And the profound question of where we are keeps on being disrupted by the more fractious, are we there yet?

In such a place, we grow sensitive to signs that this settlement may not succeed. On the one hand, all the tedium that the long hot season and the broad baking plains breeds sets afoot nickering doubts and anxieties about our circumstances, and makes us feel all the more poignantly our distance from our original homeland. On the other, we have been finding it an irritation to be so dependent on the older colonies to supply us with our essential foodstuffs, with grain and livestock, though little by little we start to stand on our own feet. In the last year or two those colonies have struggled through bad seasons of their own, and the cost to us has been prodigious. At the same time the rate of immigration here has been dropping, and with fewer land sales there has been a consequent decline in our incoming economy.

Governor Gawler tried to sustain the people with a flurry of public building programs. He put men to work, constructing not just his brave new residence, and a disconcertingly capacious new prison and a police barracks and a hospital—what must he be anticipating?—but substantial new government offices, wharves and main roads leading out of town, to encourage those others without either the means or the will to shift for themselves, and still skulking about the township, to head into the interior; and there are new bridges too, to make it easier for them to start out. The trouble is that they have already heard what it is like further out, and the reports are not encouraging.

To pay for all this and for the imported provender, he presented bills to the Colonial Office in London; and disaster! His drafts were dishonoured, the government could not pay any of its bills to the local community and Governor Gawler was recalled, which presumably constitutes a disgrace. The colony was now in fact officially bankrupt, and of course there was and still is a rush of unpayable claims, pointless litigation, forced sales, absconding tenants, and indeed some few shameful instances of absconding husbands.

Nobody knew which way to turn. So much for the triumph of planned settlement.

In short order we have another governor, and yet another commencement. Indeed, this settlement is not very different in its operations from some sort of thirty-day clock. It keeps on having to be wound up. The new Governor is Captain Grey, ominously named. He had visited here previously, armed with a new young wife, and like the surging tide he has come again—though our tides are actually only little tiddlers. Mrs Grey appears to be every bit as ambitious as he is, but does not find sufficient competition here in Adelaide to require any exertion on her part to meet the challenge. My good friend Nathaniel Hailes, one of the lower lights of the colony but a light nevertheless, an auctioneer and man about town and one with a special fondness for a poetical turn of phrase, reports that when he was introduced to her at a reception hosted by Governor Gawler, at the time the Greys first visited Adelaide, her laughter had the precise sharp tinkle of icicles. Not, he hastened to add, on account of the introduction; though he is such a short-legged bouncing little man that she may well have found the look of him frostily amusing. His taste in poetry must run towards Byron. Mrs Grey does not appear prepared to like Adelaide. She mistakes fastidiousness for elegance, and trusts to condescension to protect her self-esteem. I doubt that O.G. will have to endure another vice-regal ball.

Governor Grey has a wilting kind of presence, an appropriate emblem for the times. The crops everywhere were a disaster when he arrived, and he promptly announced that stern discipline over expenditure was absolutely required. There can be no doubt about that, although it is not a popular measure. He is like a fierce headmaster, and we miscreant pupils, if not truants, must learn our lines and do as we are told. So much for sunny South Australia. The banners all waving to greet him were announcements for auctions, and forced sales, and shops to let. And he has appeared to encourage the general exodus.

Mr Hailes thinks this was a strategy to force self-sufficiency on the settlement at large. That might be a good thing, but it is harsh. It was undoubtedly a good thing for Mr Hailes, who has never been so busy, encouraging the bidders, those who have any reserves to do so, and then knocking down the sale—which is a curious phrase to use, in the circumstances. He gets quite excited in all this, and keeps up a lively patter from his rostrum while he searches among the assembly to catch the eye of an uncertain prospect. But he is also given to more general reflections. He says we have achieved what the French Revolution could not—we have achieved equality. We are all equally without money. We have the freedom to enjoy this novel state of affairs, and we are a common fraternity in our mutual inglorious prospects.

He is not the only auctioneer in town. By no means, no. It is one of the visibly productive vocations. There are auctioneers everywhere at this unhappy time, and they have not surrendered their gavels yet. Some of them concentrate on selling off clothes and such other signs of the straitened circumstances of people here, on a Saturday evening; Mr Hailes, whose main activity is in selling villas and allotments on site, opens his mart for a medley sale on Wednesday mornings.

Those evening sales, being as it were more intimate, more personal in what is up for display, are lively fun, a kind of entertainment in themselves, with the crowd ridiculing the auctioneer’s inflated talk, and the auctioneer giving back as good as he gets. Some are rather more distressing. Not just furniture, but watches and wedding rings, books and belongings, anything that is not absolutely essential to the survival of families who have come down with the crash, all of those items bespeaking an irreparable loss, a sundering of old ties. I have regretted the books I left behind me, another kind of old friends I am separated from.

Other auctions are associated with livestock. The sale yards for these are usually just behind a hotel; or perhaps the hotel has positioned itself in front of the sale yards. Either way, each is beneficial to the other. The sales themselves can be thirsty work, and when they are concluded there are convivial celebrations by those who have made a good sale, and by those who have made a good purchase, and of course the auctioneer attends both groups. As do those who are regular observers of local practices. It is all a heady business.

Captain Grey has been an explorer, and has made a feature of recording the vocabularies of the native peoples he comes across. I wonder how he knows what they are saying to him, or about him. He made much of the return of Mr Eyre, who walked along the coastline all the way back to where Captain Grey had first met his wife, at Albany. I doubt that Mrs Grey thought much of this romantic reversal. When he was rescued, Mr Eyre had walked his clothes off, he was starving, and more than a little dishevelled. The picture that conjures up in my mind is not at all heroic. Though undoubtedly it was a most remarkable feat of endurance. But, it has to be asked, to what end? Mr Eyre’s dogged perseverance has added no more knowledge of the country he traversed than could be established from the comparable comfort, and certainly the security, of ships. The wonder then, as I think I recall Dr Johnson said of a dog’s walking on its hind legs, is not that it was done so well, as that it was done at all.

The colony at large celebrated the safe return of this most durable gentleman with a public dinner. Mr Eyre, that is, not Dr Johnson. Everybody who was anybody was there. Even I was there. As is the case in such large gatherings, the conversation tends to circulate around and about those all seated in close proximity to each other. Speeches, not particularly audible in the din, were made, toasts were proposed, bumpers were drunk. As the evening wore on, some of the participants became increasingly involved in the rising crescendo of good will, others suggested to their neighbours that a little less enthusiasm would be more seemly.

At least, that was how it was in my immediate vicinity, and I imagine it was much the same nearby, where old O.G., notorious for his irritability, began to have a difference of opinion with the manager of the Bank of South Australia, both of them respectable gentlemen. I doubt whether it was over a disagreement about the benefit of Mr Eyre’s recent expedition. In fact, by Mr Gilles’s reputation, it would not have mattered very much what the issue was. Old O.G. was easily started, and difficult to pacify. He didn’t want to be pacified. He should have been Irish.

He was up out of his seat, in a trice he had fought one arm free of his coat and his fists were up. His opponent, a taller man—but then, compared with O.G. most were—declined to back away, and so they locked horns, the one pushing and shoving, the other lunging and swinging, if the image of horns can be abandoned. Their ruckus was remote enough from the official table to avoid an official embarrassment. But for us it was a capital entertainment, both of them red in the face and snorting heavily, chairs scraping or tipping over, the waiters trying (but not trying too hard) to confine the two, we lesser mortals cheering them on and applauding most irresponsibly. I don’t believe Mr Eyre was witness to any of this very interesting tête-à-tête. Still recovering from his recent ordeal, he was too intent on pouring himself one glass of water after another, as though his long thirst was never to be quenched.

Later in the evening I managed to inform my friend Mr Hailes of my little budget of news. He clapped his hands with glee. For among his many other activities he also published an amusingly satirical newspaper, the Adelaide Independent. He was delighted with the possibility of including a sketch of the scuffle, and of collars coming awry; and that is exactly what he did. How to resolve a difference of opinion. The outcome however was not quite so entertaining, for O.G. took exception to this notice of his unbecoming display, just as he took exception to much else. He mounted a case for libel and fought it so hard that Mr Hailes was forced to close his newspaper. It was I suppose yet another scrap.

Nothing daunted himself, Mr Hailes launched an alternative paper, the Adelaide Free Press, which likewise carried pen-and-ink sketches. He wrote most of the copy himself over the thinnest disguise as ‘Timothy Short’. Much as the sketches amused me, and much as I welcomed Mr Hailes’s irreverence towards the self-important, I thought that kind of activity much too dangerous to become directly involved with it. Besides, the new paper did not last for long. Mr Hailes has thought it best to take a government billet in Port Lincoln; and all copies of the Adelaide Free Press have disappeared. I wonder how much that cost Mr Gilles. And, in a different sense, what that has cost Mr Hailes? Ah me, such friendships as we thought to make shift and flicker like the shadows thrown by the dancing flame.

My melancholy is not well assisted by the persistent and plaintive call of an owl somewhere near—I have heard a traveller from Van Diemen’s Land call it a mopoke. An apt if unfortunate name. Darkie does not care for it, the solemn depressing call I mean, and presses his muzzle against my leg, and whistles through his nose. By English expectations, there is not much of variety in this country, as the monotony of the mopoke affirms. We are not to hope for nightingales ceasing upon the midnight here. From one point of view, this is a land which has already done its dash; now all that is left is the slow working-out of its exhausting destiny.

Yet from another perspective—my continuing interest is in finding more exactly what that is—one could say that the scale of everything is too vast. Everything is big here, or rather is extensive. I never saw such vistas in England. And being always the same, and lacking in variety, is only a disadvantage if change is required. There is little of the sublime, at least in what I have so far encountered. But there is a grandeur in all this amplitude, and a reassurance in what might more kindly be called the reliability of the landscape and its endless seasons. For if we set aside the familiar pattern of the seasons on the other side of the world, and attend to what we can detect here, instead of the pattern of contradiction and antithesis that is written about in all the letters back home and recounted in the English papers, we find another pattern has been here all along, just waiting for us to see it.

Or so I think. I have been testing these reflections in some of my sketches. We have just had a productive harvest. I don’t think this represents a massive change in the seasons. It is just that so little acreage had been put to the plough, and only the colony’s recent difficulties have enforced rapid exertion by all who could find a patch of ground. The land about the settled areas is quite capable of producing more than enough to support us. All that has been wanting is the application of our own industry. And that is rather different from the gloomy reports that have been finding their way back to England. The truth is less than flattering to us but in fact much more reassuring. So many of our settlers were content to accept the governor’s largesse, or whatever a small version of that might be. They became in effect a colony of pensioners, and now from the dire necessity either to grow or starve, they are finding the sweetness of steady labour. But I begin to sound the moralist.

It is reassuring that the new life being organised in the southern colony carries on with the same unwavering pattern of the seasons. We plant our vegetables, we gather in our harvest, we sow again, and then we have a period for our leisure. The settlers are fortunate that the countryside is not thickly treed; the earth is ready for the plough. As I sketch in the agricultural activities of the year, two things have struck me very strongly. One is that with this open countryside, it is more fitting that my picture is not carried out to the edge of the paper, for this landscape is so large and in its own gentle way so very generous as to defy edges.

And in a whimsical contradiction to that, I cannot avoid noticing the efforts of the settlers, the pioneers as perhaps I should think them, to mark out their property lines and construct fences, very often picket fences, though sometimes post and rail if the intention is to make a paddock. That is all they do, they make the shape of it. They make an edge. They don’t keep anything out; kangaroos can easily find their way to the new crop, aborigines drift through the valleys and make their little camps along the water ways. They watch the men washing and then shearing the sheep without much surprise; indeed, you cannot help feeling that their lack of response to any of our new activities is in itself a silent criticism. Especially, I imagine, the work in cutting the wheat, and gathering it in stooks, and thrashing it with flails. They can see that it would be far easier to pluck a cob of corn.

That is not to say that they fail to observe. Indeed, they notice everything. And I have observed in the streets about Adelaide and out in the park lands, how sometimes they slyly mimic, to the vast amusement of the children. They do not distort in their imitation, but on the contrary are markedly accurate. The joke lies in picking out a mannerism which becomes absurd just by being singled out. One could learn from that. In a more serious mode, I think they may be an inductive people, reasoning not to achieve knowledge in our sense of it but to satisfy themselves of a sufficient explanation, and then to shrug and turn away to some other object of contemplation.

Wherever one looks are signs of the settlers’ industry, and even some of the rewards of it—well-constructed sheds, thatched cottages with flower gardens, increasing numbers of stock. The stump of the felled tree is still surrounded by native wildflowers, and for all the activity there are signs aplenty of the great peacefulness of our growing way of life, if I may except the hunting calls, the yelping of the beagles and the thudding of the horses in pursuit of game in the winter months. Sometimes a recently imported fox is released, and that will attract a great gathering of riders, perhaps the recently formed Hunt Club, all in their top hats and hunting pinks, all keen to be in on the kill and seize the prized tail. It could well have passed for England, except for the grass trees and eucalypts. Other than with episodes like that, the rural life is delightfully placid. Again, one might think, like England.

One sees differences of accomplishment of course. Cottages with slate roofs and established gardens, with prized English roses outside the door, and grapevines climbing on stakes. By way of contrast, in other instances there might be a tree stump by the door, still used for chopping billets of wood for the fire, and a keg with the ends knocked out sitting on top of the chimney, not as a trophy from a particularly thoroughgoing celebration but to increase the draught—it is a device commonly seen on the more elementary dwellings. One way or another, the people are settling down into this country, making it their own, without turning their back on where they have come from.

My fire is burning low, the little blue and orange flames flickering with lilac points along the glowing log. Time to rake out my damper from among the ashes, and break off a bit for Darkie, who has been pointing his muzzle and signalling with his eyebrows for some time now that he is prepared to venture upon it. Gyp is off foraging for whatever he can find in amongst the bushes, for the wildlife here tends to be nocturnal. What an odd name damper is for our daily bread, though it suits my current mood. On these brief forays into the bush, I always travel with either a piece of damper in my saddle bag, or the makings if I think I might camp out overnight. It is enough to content me.

I am a long way from breaking bread in my father’s house.

And that is not only tea in my pannikin, I admit.

We make something of a picture in the glimmer, Darkie and I, seated by a low fire, with just occasionally a pop, a hiss, a crackle to punctuate the silence, and the pony shifting and cropping grass nearby. A portrait: myself, by myself. Overhead, beyond the stark canopy of the trees, great glittering clouds of stars—heavens above, as my mother was wont to exclaim, bless her. All about us the vast silence of the bush, a kind of chill something felt behind us, or perhaps the weight of the nothing we know. At remote places in all the darkness must be similar tiny sparks of light, and similar solitary figures hugging themselves close to their fires, ruminating on their distance from the life they have left behind them, and in some cases reflecting on the life they have turned against, though I am not sure that I take any joy in the thought that I may still be in some sense a mirror image from my own past. In my view, it is not at all important for me to be a part of whatever I sketch, though I am content to be a witness not only of it but, if it so happens, in it. I feel myself to be something of a bystander, a watcher—I do not ask to be a main protagonist. I had more than enough of that just before I left Portsmouth.

By whatever capricious path, my thoughts have now veered around once more, like the smoke of my campfire, back in the direction of Adelaide, and to the friendly group that regularly meets at the Exchange Hotel, a venue chosen because its name encourages the kind of gossip that circulates in its big ample rooms, the chit-chat in which we review the colony’s doings, and refine our critique of those more personal affairs not generally published, or such as were only hinted at in Mr Hailes’s paper. And of course I always carry my sketchbook with me, whenever I sit down to my nobbler at a table near the bar. I am sure to see an interesting drover or settler, or witness an event to savour.

Our hostess, Mrs Fanny Ware, with her massive arms folded under her capacious chest, her big chin tucked in and her mouth turned down, presents a formidable and unassailable front; and that ensures an orderly house. You would never dare to be presumptuous. When she lowers her eyebrows and snorts, and gives her look, it is the better part of discretion to decamp, or to go and see about your dog. Urgent, when she starts tapping her foot. She would have none of that there nonsense here, thank you very much. But one or other of the barmaids will tip you a wink, and might whisper that their sister was waiting outside, and would welcome the company … and if not, well it is all too likely that on a stroll down Hindley Street you will chance upon an encouraging acquaintance. For Hindley Street is lively in the evenings, with all the auction houses and public houses and bawdy houses. It is no slouch of a promenade in the daytime too—the girls can be very colourful, and very bold.

Or I could always tidy myself up a bit and visit the neighbours, for the pleasure of their company; or, just possibly, a dalliance such as Brand used to commemorate in his more decorous though still salty songs.