Sketch 13
In which everything is churned up

I HEAR THAT Captain Strutt is at it again. He has applied to be made Governor of the new colony of Queensland. The fellow is preposterous. He has no sense of modesty, apparently. Decent, no doubt, though I am sure the men who rowed him all the way back up the river would have wished him to lend a hand at an oar from time to time, instead of sitting in the sheets and dithering with his charts.

There is a question about his capability now, after damaging his health and his vision in the centre of the desert. He might think of such an appointment as a fitting reward for his exertions, but there is much active work to be done in the forming of these new colonies. If he imagines putting himself out to pasture there, it most surely cannot be in any official capacity.

And Flute has decamped. Resigned, thrown in the towel. It is a splendid story. Apparently the curator at the museum insisted on allowing his dog the freedom of the museum, which led to frequent fouling of the main stairs; and that led to a confrontation with the Trustees, and resulted in Flute taking on the responsibilities of curator as well. Not to mention occasional necessary cleaner. The Governor, who was also the most influential of the Trustees, determined on closer acquaintance that Flute was insufficiently qualified to hold this position, and funds were found for a new director at a salary well above his.

Flute could not endure the slighting of his abilities, nor the slight upon his value, and he has resigned forthwith. Tootled. Hurrah. Now that is what comes of having a seasoned and perceptive governor, one able to take decisive action. Captain Strutt would not have been up to the occasion. His more successful competitor, Governor Grey, seemed on the other hand to like the toady. There is, as I have observed elsewhere, no accounting for taste.

Of Governor Grey, there too is a story to tell. He served a term in New Zealand, and then in South Africa; and the gossip of the moment is that he has dismissed his difficult wife. Packed her off, so to speak, for he was affronted by her intolerable behaviour in developing over-friendly relations with Sir Harry Keppel in Cape Town, while the commodore was in port. Indeed, Grey says quite bluntly that Sir Harry had stolen his wife’s affections, though from what I remember of her Sir Harry would have been hard put to it to discover any such warmth in that frigid woman. It must have been the cocked hat and epaulettes. And his red hair.

She has sailed off to England, and I can imagine Governor Grey washing his hands of her. Though to be fair, he was no more lovable than was she. But that reminded me of how closely Flute kept fluttering around young Mrs Grey. Surely there could be no connection between these two extraordinary events? Flute would have enough self-conceit to imagine it.

The racecourse at Randwick has reopened. I wonder if it will answer, being such a sandy track. Just think, if this had happened a year or two back, I might have had a chance to see the mighty Veno for myself. Homebush is too far out of the way for me. The crowds have surged in support of the racing at Randwick—for the last ten or twenty years it has been used only as a training track. One peculiarity here is that the horses race the other way round from Melbourne. That did not seem to have disadvantaged the mighty Veno. What a horse. I find that my recent discomfiture has rather taken the gloss off my drawing; however, I still take a flyer from time to time on an outside chance.

With Flute out of the way, I have been turning my thoughts towards the interior, to the goldfields over the mountains. As Mrs Dibble keeps pointing out, that is what I was best known for in Melbourne, my drawings of the diggings, and while I was doing well enough we were not exactly flush in our circumstances. I don’t know how it was, but there never seemed to be enough earnings to make us comfortable. My wife would sometimes take the liberty of saying sour things about horses, and about taverns. Look, she would say, I have barely two pennies to rub together. I am at a loss to know what she does with our money. I do not like a complaining wife. It makes for disharmony and awkwardness.

With her encouragement, and with my publisher seconding the motion, it was soon arranged for me to take the road across the mountain range to Bathurst, and from there on to the Turon valley, where great discoveries have been reported, from Sofala and Wattle Flat and Bald Hill. Because I am no longer the young man I once was, I took the coach. And no longer being the young man I was, I was ineligible for a seat on the top. Inside for the likes of me. That was quite a squeeze; we were clumped in like so many potatoes in a bag.

At first the coach wheels ground slowly along, bumping over the crushed grit of the road surface but then, once free of the town, we clattered along at a good pace along the great western road, with post-and-rail fences on each side and cleared fields. Well, nearly cleared—there were still sad-looking ringbarked gum trees standing gaunt and forlorn in those new-made paddocks, but all the brush had been gathered together and burned off.

We wound our way more slowly of course up the escarpment; and from the heights I had a good view of the far-stretching ranges and the deep valleys winding away towards bold cliffs, and vast forests sweeping up towards them. The skies are a deceptively bright blue, deceptive because there is not the warmth you might expect with that light. Haze of a more subdued blue hovers over the forests, and becomes a kind of mist along the ridges. The rock faces across the valleys vary from terra cotta to burnt sienna; and those valleys, marked out by steep walls, are all dark green. Along the edges of the road the trees are festooned with strings of long dry fine bark. Everywhere parrots and cockatoos, especially those raucous white furies with yellow crests that shriek all sorts of vile execrations at us as we pass by. Which in itself is sufficient to identify them as native to the colony.

At some stage, when the journey had already become quite long enough, we began our descent down the western slope of the mountains, at one time over a frighteningly narrow pass. Along the way whenever the road allowed, we passed bullock teams dragging a log of wood behind them to help arrest their pace. That does little to improve the surface of the road. But it does result in a steadily accumulating pile of timber at the bottom of the pass, where those about to ascend in the opposite direction commonly stop to boil up the billy, as they call it, to smoke a pipe and make themselves a cup of tea.

In spite of the best efforts of Messrs Cobb and co., it was an uncomfortable passage. Their clever leather suspension meant that instead of jolting and lurching we were bumped about in a somewhat disconcerting fashion. As the carriage rocked this way and that we never quite knew when we were going to be pulled up short. There would always be some kind of shock over the stones and potholes, that was only to be expected; but you never knew quite when to expect it. When it came, it was as a delayed jerk rather than a bone-crunching one.

That however is not altogether what I meant by my uncomfortable passage. I had been suspicious of the returns of certain signs about myself that I thought had been dealt with in Adelaide. Let me just say that not all the marks on my face were ancient scars from my childhood encounter with smallpox. Indeed, that was one of the rare occasions on which I could be grateful for those marks.

I could not account for the recurrence of my hidden symptoms, as I knew that I had been faithful to Elizabeth ever since we became acquainted. At first I thought they might just go away again, as they had in the past, in Adelaide; and of course I was diffident about presenting myself to what Trumble would have called a pox-doctor. Got the blue boar, hey? Hor hor hor.

There was very little I could do about my troubles in the coach, except to take advantage of whatever relief stops were made along the way. Undoubtedly there would be a sawbones or two on the goldfields—not least because the kind of anxiety I was envisaging was common enough among the Victorian diggers, and I did not suppose the moiling and toiling hordes here would be any more restrained in such personal matters. If my condition worsened I was sure I would find rough and ready medical assistance. But perhaps I could ease myself through this evident recurrence; I had found by past experience that the pain was not so severe when I kept alternating porter and spirits. For the time being, I would watch and wait. And sit tight.

Bathurst is a major supply centre for all the different goldfields hereabouts, with large stores and warehouses and foundries, and any number of wheelbarrows. Would-be diggers arriving from Sydney, as had I, bought what equipment they thought they might need—saws and buckets and picks and axes and the like—and if they could not carry their purchases they loaded them into a barrow and trundled off along the track to the diggings. Most of course had set out from Sydney in their own overloaded drays. I chose to follow the bridle trail up from the plains into the hills, and then over the ridge and down along the valley, or halfway down to be more exact.

Anywhere out of Bathurst is up a long pull.

The track, not much more than a worn path in places, snakes along the steep hillside, well below the crown of the ridge but also well above the river, so much so that at one time I saw three or four eaglehawks circling below me. It did not feel at all comfortable to look down so far on to the river flats. This was a dizzying height; and besides, every so often loose stones had slipped across the track and down over the edge, almost a vertical wall, and you had to watch your footing closely. Sometimes, too, miners had opened a little tunnel just off the track, to see if they could find a reef, and shale and rock chips were strewn about and made the way more difficult at that place. The absence of ongoing activity told that they had met no luck there.

We camped, as many others had, at a crossing where the water gurgled strongly over a bed of stones, most of which had been turned over many times on speculation. The serious activity was a few miles further yet, however, up over another steep pinch and around another great bend of the range and over another crossing, deeper this time, and then we were at Sofala, in the midst of much the same throng of activity as I had witnessed in Victoria.

All over the floor of the valley men were digging, either along the present river banks or into the ancient clay slopes that marked its course long ago, or sinking shafts and driving tunnels, and so industrious had they been that the original shape of the land was barely recognisable. Nowhere had been left untouched. That is to say, the scene you looked at was wholly unnatural. The earth had been heaved all over the place. Nothing had been left as it was first created. Geographical blasphemy, my father might have thought it. Forgive us our trespassers.

Further back the shopkeepers had set up their stores and the men had pitched their tents or made their shelters, and they had chopped down most of the trees, so that the edge of all this turbulence was sadly thinned out, the merest skeleton of a forest. But nobody stopped for the reflection. They were all tearing into the earth’s surface, gouging it out and washing it away, worrying at the lottery which might be theirs.

As in Victoria, so in New South Wales it is bitingly cold on the goldfields, especially in the winter months. The chief difference is that instead of soggy mud, on the Turon fields the ground is all but frozen. In the early morning, when the mist begins to rise, you see kangaroos grazing on the edges of clearings, their fur and their lashes spangled with large dew drops. At night the stars pierce the skies like points of ice, hard and glittering in a frosty sky. The temperature plummets, the clouds roll in and the skies get heavy, and then huge snowflakes drift down. At times, cutting southern winds rush along the ranges and sweep down into the wide valleys, a blight to all mankind here that the Bible never thought of.

Some hold that this country lies outside the jurisdiction of the original Creation. And beyond redemption. Not my father’s concern. It is a hard country. The lure of gold, the chance at a lucky strike, keeps drawing men from all corners of the world, with the secret hope that they might be the one. And just as in Victoria, so here you meet a steady file of poor wretches, defeated by hardship and disappointment, trudging back towards Bathurst, and indeed all the way to Sydney.

I was delighted to be back in the midst of a kind of activity I understood—activity, not just standing about—with my sketching pad at hand, ready to jot down any interesting detail I came across. This was familiar to me; I knew how it was on the fields, and the kinds of checks that timid new chums invariably bumped into, and the kinds of cheats that surrounded them, and their curious innocence. Though the old hands here were not, on the whole, rapacious. Indeed, they were for the most part good neighbours, friendly, provided nobody attempted to trespass on their leasehold. And helpful should the need arise.

The authorities had at last resolved one of the most troublesome issues on the fields, and now a digger is required to pay an annual fee for a miner’s right. But of course the chief discontent is that gold has been becoming more and more difficult to find. It is no longer sufficient to wash for gold in a pan. Now they have to dig deeper, and crush quartz to find specks of colour, and small groups of men are at a disadvantage in terms of the labour involved and the heavy machinery, the thumping and crashing stampers and crushers that this deep mining requires. From time to time their discontent boils up into suspicion, particularly against the Chinese, who seem to thrive where nobody else can and without anything cleverer than their own hands and bent backs. That has resulted in shameful attacks by the Europeans, though it is difficult to see just what end they hope for. To drive them off the field, I suppose, though they also acknowledge that the Chinese confine themselves to working over the mullock heaps considered waste by everybody else. The old story of the dog in the manger, I think.

Along with that same ill-concealed hostility, the same notions and superstitions I met in Victoria have applied here. Diggers try to align themselves along narrow corridors where gold had been found, but everyone has a different vision of how the veins lie, and where. They pay attention to the names of reefs and gullies. And to the names of diggers. One unfortunate fellow was named Timothy Coffin. You will not be surprised that nobody wanted to go down into a shaft with him; and they objected even more strongly to his working the windlass. He is consigned to the banks of the stream to puddle about and to wash for gold tailings. With such a name he will never amount to anything, poor fellow, unless he takes up employment as an undertaker’s supplier, or gets himself written into one of Mr Dickens’s facetious stories. Another miner, a Norwegian sailor who had absconded as so many did, has the absurd name Bjorn Gnarld. His parents must have had a quirky intimation of his prospects. As had my own.

What I saw on the Turon was not very much like what Flute had drawn just a matter of miles from here. In fact, his sketches are fussy beyond belief, and placed at a distance, as though he were halfway up the hillside opposite his subject. As was doubtless the case. He would not have wanted to get too close to the bustle and dirt and general pandemonium. I choose to bring my subject well forward, or if you prefer, to bring myself up to the very edge of the activity, though of course without pretending that I am part of it. I leave the field to those who own it.

In Flute’s pictures, you cannot actually see what the men are doing. There are lots of them along the banks of a creek, but they are all stooped over or sitting or standing about, much like cricket players perhaps. And forgive the uncharitable thought, but his vegetation looks just a little Californian to me. Now why would that be so? Whereas what I observe is that when the trees thin out as they do on this side of the range, the foliage appears to be formed in clumps, and that presents a problem in how to paint it without making your background forest look clotted. The diggers were doing their level best to assist me, of course, by cutting down every tree in the district. It was only marginally less bald here than at Bathurst.

At a place called Wattle Flat, now all but destitute of the nominal wattles, their attention was directed to the flat itself by elimination of everything else from the immediate vicinity. Right from the earliest days of the rush they had established a presentable race course, marked all round by saplings tied to stakes driven in to the ground, and race days are held here from time to time, when all and sundry turn up to enjoy the outing. The booths and the bookmakers do an excellent business. There are some first-rate horses in the district, and competitors with great heart. When I was there, at least two of the squatters had thoroughbreds in their stables, and from time to time young men drifted in with a small mob of horses of superior quality, with receipts convincing enough to those who wanted to believe them, and whose common practice was to race one of their horses, pocket the winnings and sell him to whomever was interested; and move on. That much was marginally acceptable, but you may be shocked to learn that while everyone is attending at the picnic meeting, thieves are also apt to enjoy themselves—helping themselves to the best of the horses that have been left grazing on the properties round about. That is as vexatious to the farmers and squatters as gold thefts are to the diggers and the buyers.

And to the police, for it is thought that these young fellows are forming into gangs of bushrangers, and have mounts that can easily outdistance any pursuers. They don’t look like the grim-faced scowling rascals lurking in the back forests north of Melbourne. On the contrary, they seem harmless young fellows with a coloured neckerchief and a ribbon around their cabbage tree hat. No longer red; black usually, or blue.

They seem more intent on fun than harm. Indeed, there is a persistent story, which the patrons of the public house I frequented insisted was completely true, that one time the winner of a race at Wattle Flat was in fact a person the police wished to interview about a recent spate of robberies. Having received the winner’s purse and the congratulations of the course stewards, he waved his hat to the admiring throng and galloped off before the authorities realised who he was. Or before any of the locals thought to inform the authorities. Whether that is true or not I do not know, but it is an example of the cheeky conduct you could expect to encounter hereabouts. And of course there is no doubting that some of the horses being raced are of a rather superior quality. Their proper owners make sure to stay very close to them when they are not actually on the track itself.

You can see from the surrounding countryside how inviting it is to go cantering off across the broad vales and rolling ridges, and once past them on to what might be called half-timbered plains; so very easy to ride through and speaking most temptingly of a carefree and perhaps careless way of life. Of course, it is also country you can see across very easily. A team of pursuers would hardly require a blacktracker to follow a band of young lads through that. Which is I suppose why at first thought they head for the hills. Much too difficult to find them there, if they do not wish to be found. And much easier to scrounge a feed from the wildlife if they had to. Indeed, that would have been their introduction to the back country, going out hunting as youngsters, and meeting up with likeminded mates on the track of the same game.

But to those who are newcomers here, this is daunting country to look at. The road sometimes leads past steep cliffs and overhangs of rusty-looking rock, blotched with lichen. Down along the riverside the tree trunks are mostly dark, a dark chocolate colour; indeed, the trunks of the she-oaks that grow along there are almost black.

The towns springing up throughout the area are very populous. The main street might be several miles long, and by far the commonest buildings are the hotels. Allowing that slab huts and sheds do not quite achieve the status of a building. You can see where all the trees have gone to, sawn into planks and pickets or split for post-and-rail fences. There must be at least thirty licensed hotels, as well as countless coffee shops, meaning grog shops, and of course a number of the storekeepers have refreshments available at the rear of their tent for trusted customers, just as at Mount Alexander. And all this quite necessary I would say to keep the cold at bay. I begin to understand why they speak of a nip of whisky; it serves as a measure of degrees of cold.

When you can draw up a stool or a block of wood to sit on near the fire, that is where you learn more about what is happening on the goldfields than by wandering about them, your breath steaming out of your mouth, your fingers too cold to hold your pencil, and a grey mist settling in the gullies and along the course of the river. You hear tales of more than the Turon, too. I told of Lola Montez and the ball of lightning at Bendigo, and as is the way of gossip in bar rooms, that led on to others by way of reply, everyone contributing their two penn’orth. Apparently when she first arrived in Sydney she was about to leave without having settled all her accounts, and a sheriff was sent to seize her. He had to jump on to the pilot boat to catch her, as her ship was already under way; she retreated to her cabin, and when he demanded entry or he would force the door, she told him that she was in bed and stark naked, and no gentleman would commit such an affront.

That utterly nonplussed him, and as she declined to dress herself so that he might arrest her, there was nothing else for it but to leave, because the pilot boat was about to return. That is a likely enough story, outrageous as she so often was, vivid, and such a picture; but it is not the kind of incident you could allow yourself to illustrate. Unfortunately. It has all the trappings of wonderful farce. Cruikshank or Rowlandson would have done it though.

With the approach of spring, the wattle that provides this place with its name comes into splendid bloom. The green bush is awash with a different kind of gold, and all sorts of birds dart in and out of the undergrowth. The warbling of the magpies carries right across the valleys in the clear thin air and the glorious blue skies begin to give a bit of warmth. If I were a cattle farmer I would be uneasy on moonlit nights. The spirit of careless independence is abroad.

Which is not always a thing to be proud of. The diggers have taken matters into their own hands at various of the diggings, both here and in Victoria, and not just in demanding relief from the licence system. As I said, they have become unhappy at the apparent success of the industrious Chinese; indeed, their very presence on the fields, let alone the substantial numbers of them, is resented. And even though the Chinese keep to their own camps, that too is seen as a provocation. Who knows what they get up to in their joss houses and the like? They have none of their own women; if they so much as look sideways at a white woman that is a flashpoint.

Matters have come to a sorry pass at Lambing Flat, where there has already been a series of attacks by my countrymen, I am unhappy to say; the men of both my old country and this new one. Now there has been a riot. Chinese diggers have been hoicked out of their shafts and trenches by their pigtails, beaten, and if any dares to retaliate that is a sufficient warrant for more extreme violence. The scrambling retreat of the inscrutables seems to have invited further brutal assaults. It is even reported that a number of them have been killed. I do not understand this ugly savagery. I cannot see a reason for it, even while I am afraid I recognise it. It is mindlessly shameful, and shamefully mindless. I wonder how many of those diggers grow big and indignant about the Eureka attack.

Yet the labour of the Chinese has been beneficial to the district. Quite a few of them have been employed in improving and consolidating the trail back to Bathurst, though there is of course a road by a longer way round, along which the mail and the gold escort can travel at a good clip.

When I heard the alarming news of the riots I thought to hire me a horse and ride across country to see for myself whatever I might see—taking on trust that he and the ostler were both law-abiding and reliable. It somehow seems appropriate that on my way I came to another World’s End, not far from where the first gold in Australia was discovered. It is even more desolate, more remote, than its namesake in South Australia. Not somewhere you would want to find yourself; a nothing. In that connection, my mind was as full of moral law as of geography, of course.

The shameful actions at Lambing Flat speak of the end of the world in another sense. That is a lawlessness that is not to be tolerated. So much for independent action. It is a kind of madness, too horrible to contemplate. I don’t suppose my father’s vision of the apocalypse was so very different, or not in its outcome.

Contrariwise, or not as the case might be, my route also took me through somewhere called Pretty Plains. I wish I had thought of that. A surveyor with a turn of wit such as to delight me.

The countryside is not populated entirely by whiskery diggers and young horse thieves and cowed Chinese and ruddy-faced publicans. There are propertied men too, among them the owners of horses attractive to the casual eye of the wild colonial boys, and the envy of those who dream of owning land when they strike it rich on the diggings. These are the men who have all but locked up the land, making it very difficult indeed for new immigrants to find a suitable holding for themselves. The old system of land grants has now been abandoned—and a good thing too; but even those who can afford to buy acreage are unable to find a selection because the best of it has all been taken up. Those who got in first pride themselves on their cleverness. They can afford to. Push come to shove.

I came across one specimen of a squatter beaming with assurance of his own sublime self-importance, and tailor-made for my portfolio of sketches. He wore a patterned waistcoat straining over his belly, a chequered broadcloth coat, an enormous jewel pin in his cravat, and tight striped unutterables. His ever-so-shiny boots had never come within an inch of getting dirt on them, or horse dung, not a mote nor a dustbeam. He was neither a Nob nor a Snob, to use my old terms, for he didn’t meet their requirements. He was not up to their mark. His kind is simply too self-satisfied to belong to any party; yet he was a type. He was a kind of John Bull in the antipodes, out of place.

His type is indifferent to that reflection, and to any other. He owns acreage, quite a lot of it. Lord of all he surveys, though he looks like he may have risen to that eminence from some lowlier position, a bailiff perhaps. The flat hat and clay pipe show his class, or lack of it. He is the sort who looks about him but sees nothing except reflections of his own good fortune. At his feet, on the ground, sat Jacky, the real worker on the property, and wearing not much more than a blue striped shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a pair of spurs. That is, no boots.

I was sorely tempted to call this squatter The Baron of Beef.

He was standing before his stockyards where, I would lay long odds, he had never set foot. Not with immaculate boots like those. So I have sketched him with his back to the yard. I like the weight of the timbers they use for those posts and rails, Australian hardwood. You would need to resharpen your axe several times in cutting and shaping them. They are heavy and solid; strong enough to take the shock of wild cattle charging into them. That kind of beast ranges about for several years before being yarded for branding, and they don’t take to it kindly. On the whole, cattle do not interest me very much. They have no personality, except for the rogues that make their escape, and go sailing off into the scrub with their head and tail up, and the native stockmen after them—and the squatter is left behind to stare at, well, nothing. World without end.

It suited my own frame of mind to work my initials into the ruts and bumps in the dirt, in along the foreground.