Sketch 12
In which home truths are revealed

THE INTIMACIES OF OUR CABIN are for ourselves alone. After my previous long voyage at sea I find little sense of wonder or novelty in the endless track across the waters. And my Elizabeth did not care to have herself blown apart on deck; so we kept to the saloon, and retired early to our berth. Besides, I was not willing to chance an unlikely encounter with a Trumble or Brand or any of that crew, if they happened to be aboard.

I will allow here one detail: Elizabeth kept my portrait with her, it was not packed away in the luggage. She kissed it often, which was endearing of course, but also I have to confess a little puzzling. Does she study her own image and delight in it, I wonder, or does she study my study of her, and find that delightful?

Sydney offers us a new world of opportunity, another life to make; and it does not disappoint. Even though this was the same season of the year as Melbourne’s, the seas (as we approached the famous harbour) were calm, the sun shone, the entrance met us with just a gentle swell as we glided beneath its towering cliffs, and we were welcomed into what seemed one giant bowl of champagne. Madame Montez’s kind of place. Indeed, she had preceded us by just a week or two, though we did not expect to catch up with her again. And on the whole, I preferred not.

Of whom, by the way, we later learned she had just departed, with her lyrebird and white cockatoo. And leaves behind a rumour that she conducted one last brief affair, with the younger brother of the Duke of Wellington. It is no wonder her bandy-legged consort always looked so glum, and kept his revolver handy.

Many have written of their astonishment at both the extent and the beauty of this harbour. Captain Strutt included, the best part of a lifetime ago, though whether his impressions were recorded at the time, or after his long excursion up and down the Murray and in contrast to it, I do not know. The light on the harbour is so clear that everything is lucid, the detail sharp. What delights me, and my eye, is the unending sequence of bays and headlands, and occasional small islands. Everywhere is a picture, but eventually this becomes a disadvantage. You can have too much of the picturesque, so that in the end you begin not to notice it. Unlike South Australia, which I begin to remember as endlessly the same, almost one might say monotonous. To be fair, that was not how I thought of it at the time.

Along the foreshore here are low broken sandstone cliffs, with overhangs making small caves. The rocks along the shore are covered with oysters—not barnacles, oysters. Above and behind is a dark green rising landscape, with here and there columns of smoke where the natives are camped, and at other places, especially wherever there is a vantage point, clearings in the woods and very substantial mansions gleaming in the sunlight.

Praise be, our vessel brought us right to the wharf, past the sprinkling of grand houses and what seemed extensive parks and gardens, and a small island being converted into an elegant defensive works, answering to a bristling fort on a low promontory nearby, as though Sydney looks to assume the status of an antipodean Portsmouth; past the Governor’s residence, and then past the semi-circular quay where all the cargo ships crowd in, and gang planks lead almost directly from the big stone warehouses up to their decks. Just such as Governor Hindmarsh had wanted for Adelaide, but was disappointed.

This is both an extensive harbour and a busy port, the activity taking place in a number of the adjacent bays; and of course out along the waterway, with little steam ferries darting about, and yachts and fishing boats and rowing boats more leisurely, and the romance of the great ships arriving or departing. Here we were, about to make a new start like Adam and Eve, the world a fat oyster before us, where to choose … For I propose to try my hand at Sydney, to see if I can do better for myself.

To modify our first rapture, it gets dark quickly here in the mid-year, and there is not much warmth in the late afternoon sun. It is, after all, a winter sun. And this is the time of day a brisk breeze gets up, coming down the whole length of the harbour, and reminding those walking about that they should button up their coats, and plunge their hands in their pockets. The harbour breeze funnels up the broad valley, more like a gulley perhaps, where we have found accommodation, in a little terrace house just around the corner from the museum, and down the hill from Hyde Park, where officers used to race their horses and where now respectable society strolls along newly formed pathways.

Indeed, respectable society is well catered for here. There are other extensive walks in and about the public domain, and through the botanical gardens there, with its new aviary, and down along a narrow peninsula with a splendid outlook on to the harbour, and where it will be convenient to find a cooling breeze in the warmer weather. Respectable society has to keep its wits about it though, for up on the rise across the valley is the gaol where public executions take place, and if you happen to be facing an inappropriate direction you may from time to time be confronted with what you would prefer not to see.

The little area where we will live has a bizarre native name, Woolloomooloo. That is a name too long by far, and as I write the word I think what a strange sequence of curls and swirls it makes, like a child’s drawing of smoke from a chimney. Or perhaps more aptly, like a corkscrew. It doesn’t seem like a word at all. Which is rather different from complaining as I did about Port Misery, that it was no place at all. Here is most evidently a place, already well established, but what kind of place remains to be discovered. I suspect it is not quite the best sort of place, not the sort of place for respectable people to walk about for example. They confine themselves to further up the rise on either side. There are a good many hotels at most of the street corners, and pothouses in the lanes. And as in parts of Melbourne and Adelaide, you encounter plenty of girls and blowsy women on the footpaths here. It is a kind of hollow between the high ground of the churches. I hope it is not a trough. But it is what at present we can afford—the rent here is every bit as fierce as in Melbourne. And I now have a responsibility, whereas before I could have made do with very little.

There was no time to lose. I must set about establishing myself here at once. Within the week I had found suitable rooms for a studio, at the lower end of the main street, George Street, a kind of extended High Street, though I do not think the Sydneysiders would appreciate the comparison. And in point of fact, there are quite a few examples of charming architecture, modest buildings with well-proportioned awnings, made of the local stone, which glows like honey in the sunlight. The main road rises steadily towards the south, past the markets, and somewhere out that way is the new university, and the road swings around towards Parramatta, where the Governor has a second residence.

Somewhere out that way also are the brickfields, and when the wind gusts from that direction I am told it carries clouds of red dust across the entire township, and whirls it up into boisterous columns. The fine grit is said to sting your face and get into your eyes; papers and parasols are flung about, and hats go bowling down the street. A conspicuous as well as a colourful disadvantage—I imagine, for I have yet to experience this untoward event. I am in no hurry for that. It is called a southerly buster, and also, inevitably, a brickfielder.

In the other direction, and much closer at hand, is one of the oldest parts of Sydney, with stone cottages and ramshackle huts and lean-tos all jammed up against each other, and dingy little alleyways and unhealthy looking lanes. And goats wandering about. Windmills on the heights, and distilleries and breweries down close to the water’s edge. The Rocks, they call it. It has a reputation for being a lawless place; there is a conspicuous presence of seamen on shore leave and rough dock workers and riff-raff, gangs of young louts on the look-out for whatever opportunity offers, whether a cart to steal from, a woman to insult, or an elderly man to torment. By common report, they vary these activities by engaging in street fights, usually in the darkness of the evenings. I have not felt the necessity of presenting myself in this quarter after hours, as it were—there are plenty of alternative taverns and public houses, the predominant attraction of that neighbourhood, further around the Quay. And of course, up along George Street. Sydney looks to be a thirsty town.

My studio is up a flight of stairs, above a stationery shop where I have arranged to display my work; the location is convenient for any students who may wish to undertake instruction, for that also is my intention, to ensure a steady income. As I must, in my new circumstances. No more hand to mouth living now. My windows look out on to the street intersection, and just at this moment as I am writing I can see of all things a small brass band, with only a small boy and his dog looking on. The lack of more general interest suggests that their presence here is not a rare event. Either that, or the performance lacks conviction. I suppose they are a group of unsuccessful gold diggers, returned from the interior—just as in Melbourne. For men must find something to do, some means of supporting themselves.

My first priority—can there be any other priority?—has been to acquaint myself sufficiently with the streets and sights of Sydney to begin a series of sketches, just as I did in Adelaide and Melbourne, for experience shows that this kind of thing is very acceptable to the public, and will at the same time serve to announce my presence here. I began this part of my campaign just four days after our arrival. It was not the balmiest time of year to be walking about, but Elizabeth has a warm shawl and joined me in some of my walks, and it felt quite something, I can say, with her hand resting on my arm as we strolled through the parks and along the various pathways behind the new Government House domain.

When I walk on my own, I set out for more distant scenes and subjects. One such excursion took me towards the genteel neighbourhood to the east of the town, where I came across a pretty little village church, St Mark’s, and its parsonage, and made a series of studies, thinking (as has proved correct) that this might attract interest from the right sort of people. Meaning, of course, the Nobs and Snobs. I revived an old trick in one of those sketches, by including my gloves alongside the baptismal font. It reminds the viewer that somebody is present in what seems otherwise an emptiness. But also, I chose to draw on buff paper, and reaching further back into my bag of tricks, I touched in some Chinese white to lend shape to an otherwise flattened depiction. I hadn’t tried that since long ago, in my time in the silhouette studio. I was quite pleased with the final effect.

Other sketches of the church and parsonage have a small family comme il faut standing outside the picket fence, a boy with his hoop, a little girl close to her mama’s skirts; though after I had finished a number of these I succumbed to temptation, and drew a scapegrace lying on the path, holding his bottle, beyond redemption for at least the next two or three days. And in a pleasing drawing of the vicarage, with a pair of Nobs in polished silk hats passing slowly by, and one posed on an equally silky horse, I was again guilty of a sin of commission, and drew in a digger with his pick over his shoulder and two little scruffy dogs rushing ahead of him. He is of course going in the wrong direction, and he is in the wrong part of the colony. The gold that way is already pocketed. It is the road to riches, right enough, but not for him. In my view this is not a sentimental country, though of course there are pretensions that way. Too much so for my taste.

Respectability requires much of us. Attendance at church, for example; I prefer to put my Sundays to other uses, and go walking with Mrs Dibble, so to speak. I am not used to that title as yet, though Elizabeth rather likes the status it confers. She proves a charming companion, but I have to confess she is not a born home-maker. And finds housekeeping beneath her new dignity. I was unconcerned about such matters in the past too, in my bachelor days. I find our new quarters hamper me when I try to work at home, and so I have taken to working longer hours at the studio, as at Melbourne, preparing a series of sketches for lithographic printing, and hand-tinting the prints. That leaves Elizabeth to her own devices, but we have rented a piano for her to play. It takes up what little room we have, and so forces the issue of where I work on my paintings.

And sometimes, if I stay out too late, and call in to a public house on my way home to reward myself for my hard work, she has been inclined to signal her displeasure. To the point of slamming doors, which is not what I would have expected of her. These are trying days for both of us.

Out of doors is better. Indeed, Sydney’s climate is perfectly adapted for walking about, and the ladies will often go without their parasol, relying on their bonnet to keep the sun from their face. We live close enough to the Domain to take a turn or two there, and there is never a day but there is something of interest to look at—gentlemen riding about on very good horses, children running about with their hoops and balls, gardeners cutting and planting and making new walkways, new botanical specimens being planted, new arrivals in the aviary. And from that long finger of land are views of the harbour where there is always activity of one sort or another, most splendidly when a warship visits.

In the centre of the public gardens is a monument recently erected to the botanist Mr Allan Cunningham, standing in a pond (the monument I mean) and with willows tastefully weeping around the banks, and a carefully groomed path encircling. And well-behaved families absorbing the spectacle and thinking appropriate thoughts, and feeling appropriate feelings. It was just the sort of scene to add to my series of Sydney sketches, so we spent a little while there while I jotted a quick outline in my pad.

These gardens are not much frequented by the colourful figures you find elsewhere in Sydney. The promenades are for top hats. I have taken to wearing a modest top hat. Elizabeth has harried me to it. And I have taken to sporting a riding crop, for no particular reason than that I fancy it. Perhaps also as an oblique memento of Lola Montez—given she is now safely off and away, I can flourish it without sly reminders of her famous affray in Ballaarat. I am unlikely to be so adventurous with mine.

When the weather becomes warmer and the days longer, gentlemen arrange occasional cricket matches in the Domain. That has turned more serious through rivalry with Melbourne, widely regarded here as a young upstart sort of place, full of mere whippersnappers. They challenged Sydney to an intercolonial cricket match, which gave rise to a local to-do because someone had the presumption to peg out the choicest part of the Domain to make the ground, right where the military have been accustomed to conducting their various drills and manoeuvres.

I see an interesting conflict here, not so much between the colonies as between two ideas of what the colonies are for. The history of this settlement has been all about red coats and blue coats and undoubtedly that was necessary at the time. But now is the age of the plough, and the shepherd, and builders and labourers and diggers. The people do not look for a state of armed preparedness, the various gun placements about the harbour notwithstanding. They seek the pleasures of an established, self-regulating orderly life. Cricket bats and bonnets, not bayonets. The military are another set of swaggerers, and I deduce that the people do not like uniforms. Well, the men don’t. They resent the airs the officers in particular give themselves; a martial air. The ladies’ heads are readily turned by a bit of gold braid, and squared epaulettes. And shiny boots. I wryly observe my own hobnail bluchers, and admit them an inescapable limitation to whatever other attractions I may display.

Cricket is not a sport that holds my attention. It is so still. The players stand around, the spectators stand around, the umpires stand around. Occasionally a bowler runs up to the wicket, even more occasionally each batsman runs to the opposite end of the pitch. It is all so languid. I prefer action, and tension, such as two crack horses thundering down the home stretch, neck and neck. (I twitch my riding crop at the very thought of it.) Or when your mount goes soaring over fallen tree trunks in pursuit of a kangaroo, or an unruly steer. Or two pugilists standing toe to toe, exchanging blows, and you have a wager on the underdog.

At the cricket match, everyone is of course facing the ground of play, which means my picture is all of the backs of people, not necessarily their most interesting aspect. A long-legged gentleman leans on his cane, another on his furled umbrella. Carriage horses stand between the shafts, riders have found some shade under a tree, and one horse is rubbing its haunch against the trunk. Further back from where the game is being played, and where there is less competition for a place, people sit on low stools, or lean against a tree, but they are so distant that you wonder what they can see of the game. There is no cheering, only limp clapping from time to time. So, to comment on all this arrested stillness, I have included a young urchin running at full tilt down the slope, and nobody pays him any attention. He may as well not be there. As far as they are concerned, he isn’t. Ain’t. Across the field and on the other side of the domain, the terraces and public buildings of the town, and peeping over the trees a church steeple. Everything is so sedate you could weep for vexation.

I am beginning to ape the gentry, except their studied leisureliness. I go where they go, I take in their views, and I sketch them. I have taken a ride out toward the South Head of the harbour, and looked at the lighthouse, and the ships coming in through the entrance, and the dangerous cliffs where the Dunbar was wrecked in a driving storm. I wanted to see if I could make sense of how the captain and his crew could have mistaken the entrance, and steered the ship smash into the rocks with such tragic loss of life. That was the topic of the day. Sydney could not get enough of it. Parsons and stone masons were in great demand; and artists too, who could imagine the scene for the illustrated papers. It was a chance for me, good luck come from bad. So I studied the view and then I refreshed myself at a welcoming hotel at the little fishing village behind the cliffs, in Watsons Bay.

I have crossed over to the other side of the harbour, and been to another little village on the northern shore, called Manly; and drawn a sketch of the approach to the jetty. I have viewed other small settlements along the way, the old whaling station, and some of the vantage points being used for gun batteries. I have taken the little steam ferry across the channel and sketched Sydney from the rise of land opposite, and Mr Mort’s dry dock in Balmain. Everywhere, satisfying signs of an established settlement, beyond unpleasing disturbance—instead of dogs running and barking I might insert a man pushing a wheelbarrow. Or perhaps sitting on the handle and lighting his pipe. All around the shores of Sydney Harbour you find men just sitting and smoking. They too are in no hurry to go anywhere. Their version of sedate, you see. Perhaps they do not think there is anywhere to go.

Or they cannot imagine anyone would want to be anywhere else.

From all these scenes I have made what the people here should find a very pleasing set of sketches, though the publisher arranged for another to prepare the lithographs. He thought that would assist me, and so no doubt it did, though of course I also want to be involved in the entire process of bringing out my sketches.

With the series advertised, I have been in a position to find other useful contracts, devising the covers and title pages for books, for instance, and even advertisements for the publisher and the stationer where I display my work. And just as I had hoped, in very short order clients have begun to seek me out. A French gentleman, Monsieur Noufflard, a wool broker in fact and a beginning collector of paintings, asked me to undertake eight sketches of his house, a modest but pleasant establishment not far from old Government House. He has already acquired a scene of the harbour by Martens, which suggests very good judgement on his part. But horror of horrors, also one by Flute. There can be no accounting for taste.

I was the more attracted to the undertaking just because his quarters were so modest, and because he is very clearly independent of any of the cliques that so irritate me. He keeps to himself, a busy man and possibly disappointed with his life here. I did not venture to enquire, but I noticed that while his little daughter was in the care of a housekeeper, there was no trace of a wife, nor mention of one either; and I was not going to ask the question. Indeed, when I sketched the main bedroom, I noted his trombone leaning in the corner, not in its case, and I venture to think that no wife would tolerate that. Whatever the story here, and however poignant or fraught it may have been, was not my business. But I could not resist including the little girl standing politely if somewhat sadly in the kitchen with the housekeeper; and I noticed that the table there was set for just one person.

What should have been the dining room had been given over to the broker’s office, and there he and his clerk have settled in together with numerous crates and cartons, and the dining table has been moved into the drawing room. It is a bachelor’s kind of arrangement, a making do. I should know, I lived somewhat that way myself for close to fifteen years. The lack of pretensions spills over to the courtyard at the rear, where the bullock teams draw in, and the bales of wool are stacked on a verandah, awaiting shipment. I watched a large black-and-white cat creeping up on some large black-and-white magpies. They are confident enough not to be skittish about a cat’s presence, though they keep their eye on him.

Magpies prefer to present themselves in profile.

The truth of the Frenchman’s establishment lies indoors and at the back. It is plain, and it serves its purpose well enough; but it was not a home, or only for the time being. At the front is a different aspect, a fine-looking brick house with eight square-paned windows across its upper storey, and a wrought-iron fence, and a wide flagstone verandah, off which there is access to the gentleman’s office, and a separate entrance to the residence. There are intimations of wealth and taste and status here. Across the road are horse stables, which tells that this is not after all the finest location.

My patron left it to me to draw whatever took my eye, but so as to represent the house, by which I took him to mean the household as a whole. For anyone else—the somewhat complacent wealthy settlers and shareholders in Adelaide for example—it was customarily enough to display the exterior of the house in its grounds. Here the grounds amounted to a small garden of native plants between the fence and the verandah. Clearly this was a different kind of commission, and intriguing. He seemed well pleased with my effort.

I have made occasional chance encounters, at race meetings for example, where once I met with a delightful young local woman, not much more than a girl really, but already fully self-confident and yet beguilingly without airs. She permitted me to sketch a portrait, one of the best pencil drawings I have done, a quick full-length figure quarter turned towards me, in her riding habit and, for my own amusement, holding my riding crop. It is well for me that her mother, who made sure that she kept close by while I worked, did not understand the allusion. It was right and proper that the dear mama should be there, though given that I have become a little stout, even portly, in the last year or two, I am more likely to be a danger to myself than to the fair young miss. I worked up the sketch into a coloured portrait and delivered it to the address they gave me; and that was a useful fee too, as well as a pleasure. Elizabeth did not seem disposed to share in it with me.

I had been keeping my hand in with sketches of my old favourites, the horses, of course, and this as it turns out led to another unfortunate event. In yet one more of those intercolonial rivalries, a group of backers of what was considered the Victorian champion, Alice Hawthorne, were trumpeting the accomplishment of their mare and let it be known that they would race her over three miles against any challenger. And the owner of the crack galloper here in Sydney, Veno, took up the challenge.

The toss of a coin (there it is again—how many decisions in life are made in such a flippant manner. If I may coin a phrase for the occasion) determined that the Sydney horse must travel to Melbourne for the race, and so of course the Sydney papers were keen to offer a full report. One of the sporting papers approached me, knowing that I had a special enthusiasm not only for the horses, but for drawing them too, and commissioned me to work up a sketch of a close finish, so that it would be ready for when the reports were relayed back from the south. And that is what I did.

The race was run at Flemington, which I knew very well indeed, and won handsomely by the Sydney champion, by a good three lengths. There were loud acclamations in the local press and in the streets, of course. And my illustration supported the liveliness of the reports. The sporting paper which had retained me was well satisfied with my work, even though I had depicted a much closer tussle than it turned out; and I had my fee. Which ought to have been a very satisfactory result all round.

However, a rival paper published remarks soon after to the effect that my picture was an engraving of other horses and drawn in advance of the result being known; my paper sued for libel, and the matter proceeded to the courts. The owner of Veno and the jockey both testified that the picture in the paper was nothing like Veno. How embarrassing that was! For the truth of the matter was that I had never actually seen the horse, nor the Melbourne mare either, and had drawn them from such descriptions as I had been able to garner. And when I was called to the witness box I was forced to acknowledge as much by the questions of the lawyer for the other paper. It was all too vivid a reminder of my unhappy summons to court in Adelaide. I was able to insist that it was my own drawing, and no copy (as they alleged); and that because I could not know the outcome in advance I had merely drawn the two horses neck and neck at some imagined stage in the race, not at the finishing line as they were erroneously claiming.

There was much general laughter at my discomfiture, especially when the cross-examining lawyer sneered ‘in Veno veritas, hey Mr Dibble?’ I need not explain the impertinence of that. The judge was not pleased with the witticism. Perhaps he had been planning to say it himself in his summing up. The law is like that. They are all in a race of their own.

The jury decided against us, the sporting paper was not disposed to use my services again, and the rival paper, where I had previously placed notices of my books of sketches and the like, frowned at me too. All in all I lost out considerably by this public humiliation; and yet I had intended no deception, nor was I deceiving myself. I had simply done the best I could. Anyone who knows me would know that to be true.

And of course our troubles never come singly. I was showing the stationer some of my sketches of the Victorian goldfields, and speaking of doing something of the same kind here; and he remembered that there had been a series of prints of the New South Wales fields when gold was first discovered just past Bathurst. Who do you imagine those were by? Why, none other than my old bête noire, a horse of another colour, the ineffable Flute—confound him. He is always in my way. More so than I properly understood, for it appears, from what my informant said, that he does not live far from me. He has a suite of rooms in the museum, where he is the resident secretary and accountant; which to me means a glorified clerk, but he could not admit that, even to himself.

How often does it happen that someone you haven’t seen, or even thought of, for years and years is no sooner mentioned than (speak of the devil) he turns up right in front of you. On the open ground of Hyde Park. This is at the upper end of the township, where the churches are building their cathedrals and where the law courts are centred. It is not at all like the patches of scrub that I remember throughout Adelaide, or the jumble of Melbourne. There has been a very considerable effort to impose orderliness here.

I was crossing towards the town, and he was coming right towards me, strolling towards the museum. There could be no sudden turning away in such a situation. I might have ventured on more bravely, but I was, I confess, somewhat crestfallen, discomfited by reason of my recent misfortune. I think I would rather avoid the courts, given a choice about it. The fantastical Flute was chock-full of aplomb, as I recall was his wont. His nose was in the air; out there in the open, with just the two of us walking towards each other, he refused to notice me. It was utterly ridiculous. He was utterly ridiculous. That made me laugh, although it is inconvenient that the museum is close by. The wonder is that our strange encounter has not happened before this. Perhaps he has been gadding about with his impeccable china paintbox.