‘Australia, associated in our memory . . . as the abode of strange beasts and barbarians, sends us a full, up-to-date representative woman, widely alive to all the refinements of life, and fully cognisant of the rights of her sex.’
– Boston Woman’s Journal
Australia’s granting of the vote to women caused a sensation all over the world: in the USA and the UK, in Canada, Russia, Turkey, Sweden and Chile, women envied their Australian sisters who had achieved their aim without bloodshed and apparently with very little opposition. (The press outside Australia had clearly not been keeping an eye on the local newspapers.) Australia, that large, strange country at the other end of the earth, was starting to be known as an up-to-date and progressive nation.
The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), formed in 1890, kept a watch on suffrage developments in other countries. By 1902, under the presidency of Carrie Chapman Catt, this organisation was ready to have its inaugural international meeting.1 The first conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance was to be held in Washington in February that year. This was the first time that women would come together from all over the world to discuss, evaluate and compare their status. In preparation, all delegates had to write a report on the status of women in their country and were sent a list of twenty-eight questions dealing with women’s social, political and educational status on which to base their report.
The almost unanimous choice as the Australian representative was Vida Goldstein, and in December 1901 the Sphere launched a campaign for subscribers to pay her fare. Rose Scott, the foremost advocate of women’s rights in New South Wales, paid about one-third of the cost out of her own pocket, and her NSW National Council of Women also contributed towards Vida’s expenses.
Vida was asked to speak about the situation of women in Australia, and was also tasked with investigating the sentencing and treatment of criminals in the USA on behalf of the Criminological Society of Victoria. The premier of Victoria asked her to inquire into the conditions of neglected children, and she also agreed to look into labour problems for the Trades Hall Council. A few members of the THC objected to this, since Vida was a middle-class woman without direct experience of working in industry, and they made their views known; however, the conference executive ignored them.2 Vida expected to be away for about four months, and Aileen Goldstein took over the editing of the Sphere in her absence.
Vida, aged thirty-three and buoyed by the support of her colleagues as well as her own sense of mission, was looking forward immensely to this new adventure. Not only would she advance the cause of women’s rights in a very public way, but she would have fun. As she wrote, ‘I am always on the qui vive [on the alert] for anything in the shape of an experience.’ She must have felt she had been let off the leash: for the first time she would be away from domestic worries – including the tension between her parents, which was becoming more intense. And so, with her clothes and papers in a small tin trunk, she travelled to Sydney on the initial stage of her journey.
Her first port of call was the Woollahra house of Rose Scott. A striking woman in her mid-fifties with brilliant eyes and a strong jaw, known as a beauty in her youth, Scott had for years been at the forefront of feminism in Sydney. She had deeply felt and firm principles and was an indefatigable pamphleteer, speechwriter and journalist. She was also a skilled networker and lobbyist, a Sydney celebrity who knew most of those whose business was social reform. Her Friday evening salons were famous: writers, politicians, lawyers and philanthropists gathered in her home to drink tea and argue about current issues and events.
Vida naturally wanted to thank Scott for her generous financial support of the trip to the USA, and this was the first time the two women had met. They spent two days together and got on famously. Like Vida, Scott was a pacifist, opposed to Australia’s involvement in the Boer War, and both women were resolutely against the influence of organised political parties. However, Scott also disapproved of the militant campaign for the vote that was being waged by the English suffragettes: Vida was not so sure.
From Sydney, Vida boarded the US mail vessel Sierra. She found sea travel exhilarating and boasted that ‘the rougher it was, the more I liked it’. She spent much of her time on deck, glorying in the sea spray and bracing wind, while others suffered from seasickness below. Standing against the weather on deck seems to have been the most excitement Sierra had to offer, apart from cigar races: ‘Six girls stand at one end of the deck, each with a box of matches in her hand; six men stand at the other, each with a fresh cigar. As soon as the signal to start is given the men race up to the girls, light their cigars at the matches struck and held by the girls, and must then race back to the starting point smoking the cigars.’ Vida and her partner came second, probably because Vida worked out that it was necessary to shield a match against the wind.3
After twenty-one days on the boat, with a short stop in Auckland, Vida disembarked at San Francisco, where she was met by three members of the NAWSA bearing a letter of welcome from Carrie Chapman Catt. Vida was to stay at the home of Theresa Speddy.
Some aspects of American life she quickly found difficult. She was horrified at the cost of having her luggage taken to her hostess’s house: it was three times the Australian rate. And in one large office, she suddenly ‘shot about three feet in the air’ thinking she was on fire. She had been standing on top of an ornamental grating in the floor, which released hot air by means of steam pipes.
She found a much more congenial though equally startling method of travelling through the air when she visited the Chutes amusement park with the Speddy family: ‘Having paid your fare you enter a car, which takes you up a wooden incline to a height of fifty or sixty feet [15–18 metres]. On reaching the top you transfer to a platform on the opposite side to enter a long, flat-bottomed boat at the head of another steep incline.’ It was her first experience of a roller-coaster, and it is easy to imagine her excitement as she whizzed down, down at great speed to a shallow lake at the bottom: ‘The boat behaved as a flat stone does when it hit the water, shooting up and then down again, until it reached a landing stage on the far side of the lake. When the boat struck the water, I struck the air.’ She was very keen to have another turn, though the Speddy family, even the children, were not. She went by herself this time, and insisted on sitting at the front of the craft. ‘I would have given worlds to know what it was like to shoot the Chutes in a perpendicular position in the stern,’ she said wistfully. Vida the lover of speed, the woman who as a debutante had driven a team of horses through southern Victoria for a bet, was having the time of her life.4
In Salt Lake City, Utah, the president of the Suffrage Association arranged for her to stay with a Mormon family for a couple of days. Having read about the Mormons’ reputation for polygamy, she said she felt queasy, with ‘visions . . . of two or three dozen wives drawn up in line to receive me’. However, she did not meet any polygamous families – not surprisingly, as the practice had officially ceased about ten years before – and greatly admired the city, which she described as clean with no evidence of poverty. She visited Utah state prison and thought it superior to anything in Victoria. Her praise for Salt Lake City was reciprocated: when she gave a public lecture about Australian women and their public work, the Salt Lake City Tribune described her as ‘charming’.
Vida marvelled at the evanescent glory of the seasons in the northern hemisphere. Travelling by train through the Sierras from San Francisco to Chicago, she was entranced by the strong, vivid colours of the snow-covered deserts. But her wonder at the natural beauty of the USA disappeared when she reached Chicago: the city was filthy, thanks to coaldust. Wearing light-coloured clothing was unwise, she noted, as it would be black by the end of the day. She said she was not surprised that Chicagoans on foot rushed through the streets as quickly as possible in order to get indoors again, and were likely to send visitors flying into a lamppost or onto the roadway.5
But she was pleased to arrive in Washington, whose neoclassical buildings convinced her it was the most beautiful city in the USA. She noted that the Art Commission had full jurisdiction over the architecture of all public buildings and the layout of streets and parks ‘so there may be no artistic or aesthetic crime perpetuated. I shall ask Mr Deakin to make a mental note of that fact and remember it when the Federal Government decides when and where to build our Federal Capital.’ (Well, one is tempted to say, good luck with that.)
Vida naturally took great interest in the business of US federal legislation. Congress, she thought, was rather go-as-you-please, lacking the ritual and dignity of the Westminster system. Congressmen could wander in and out, visitors leaned over the balcony above the floor of the chamber to talk to members, cake and fruit were sold on the steps of the Capitol all the time Congress was sitting, and visitors could take food into the chambers. ‘Parliamentary messengers, such as we have, in a neat uniform, are unknown in America. Instead there are a dozen or more boys, thirteen to fourteen years of age, who loll about on the steps by the Speaker’s chair, chatting and laughing and showing each other their latest purchases.’6 She was surprised and disappointed to see that the Congress chambers were almost empty for important debates involving racial issues – for instance, on the education of Native Americans and the question of America’s relationship with the Philippines.
The suffrage conference, at Georgetown Presbyterian Church, was more formal and, she thought, much better organised than Congress. It opened on 12 February in a grand building, and to it came 186 American delegates and representatives from Australia, England, Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Turkey and Chile, with reports from France, Belgium, Switzerland, China and Japan.
The sheer scale and ambition of the gathering was apparently less important to journalists than the appearance of the delegates, especially if they were white. The Boston Woman’s Journal, for instance, described ‘the fair-skinned, sweet-faced women from Norway and Sweden, the lively little German Fraulein with eyes like diamonds, the tall, jolly-looking Senorita from Chili [sic], bright-eyed and rosy, looking more like an Englishwoman than a Spaniard, the Dean of the American College for Girls at Constantinople, quiet and sensible, and the bright-eyed, delicate-featured lady who speaks such excellent English’.
The conference was opened by Catt, of whom Vida was clearly in awe. (Catt would be one of those who drove acceptance of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US constitution giving American women the vote in 1920, and the subsequent founder of the US League of Women Voters.) In her early forties, she chaired the meeting effortlessly, with clarity and good humour. Vida wrote, ‘She is not a speaker, she is a born orator. She has a perfectly marvellous executive ability; to see her preside over a great meeting is something not to be forgotten.’7 And: ‘Mrs Catt has been the moving spirit of the international suffrage movement – it is wholly owing to her inspirational efforts, her intellectual ability, her genius for organisation and her generosity in the disposal of her time and money, that the women of so many nations have joined together in an association whose work will be of untold benefit in breaking down sex, racial and international prejudices and divisions.’8
Vida was introduced by Susan B. Anthony, the legendary women’s rights activist and social reformer, then in her eighties, as ‘Miss Vida Goldstein, of Australia, where women vote’. Vida gave her listeners a brisk explanation of the Australian system of government, state and federal, and announced that all Australian women would not only be able to vote but also have the right to sit in parliament. This, she said, was the result of twenty years’ hard struggle. She concluded: ‘I want to say to you that if Australia, that land tucked away in that far corner of the world, can trust its women with a vote, why cannot . . . American men do the same? You trust the Indian, you trust thousands and tens of thousands of ignorant, illiterate foreigners who arrive on your shores every year. I am proud to have the privilege of coming today to plead with you to trust your women. You will find your trust is not misplaced.’9
One of the aims of the conference was to form an international committee to promote woman suffrage. Anthony, who had campaigned to abolish slavery during the American Civil War and who, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had set up the American Equal Rights Association, was named president. Vida, the admired representative of a new and progressive nation, was elected secretary. For her, no less than hearing Catt speak, the meeting with Anthony was ‘the great moment of my life’. She added, ‘She is eighty-two years of age, and for over fifty years one of the foremost in the suffrage fight, and still fighting with wonderful strength and energy.’ Vida noticed that Anthony attended every meeting and was always the first down for breakfast in the morning.
The real committee work now began. Delegates worked from early in the morning until midnight every day. A subcommittee consisting of Vida, Catt and the Englishwoman Florence Fenwick Miller drew up the constitution for the Equal Rights Committee, declaring that ‘men and women are born equally free and independent members of the human race’, that cooperation was the natural relation of the sexes to each other, and that the repression of the rights of one sex inevitably injured everybody.
Vida had nothing but admiration for the vitality and efficiency with which American women ran committees, how they managed to give everyone a voice while moving swiftly through the business at hand. ‘The whole week’s programme [went] through without a single hitch, there was not one discordant note struck,’ she noted with satisfaction. ‘This was in contrast to meetings of the Daughters of the [American] Revolution – a society opposed to woman suffrage’ being held at the same time in Washington: ‘They seemed to be wrangling all day.’10 Vida was given the nickname of ‘Little Australia’, and a large number of delegates wrote affectionate messages in her autograph album and promised to keep in touch. Her networks were increasing in size and complexity all the time.
The wider American political scene did not impress her greatly: ‘Here the working people do little and know little [about political issues]. The woman suffragists in America come from the well-to-do educated middle class, and the men who support them are of the same. The very wealthy don’t bother themselves about politics and the working class, unfortunately, have no power but are manipulated by the party machines. In Australia we hear only a small portion of the corruption practised here. I could never have believed that things were so bad.’11 And: ‘Politics are entirely in the hands of unscrupulous men, who have risen from the ranks and made money.’ Nothing Vida saw in the United States altered her suspicion of organised politics and the party system.12
After the conference had come to an end, and after Vida had addressed committees in both houses of Congress, she was invited to meet Theodore Roosevelt, recently confirmed as the twenty-sixth president of the United States.
Roosevelt had come to office aged forty-two under traumatic circumstances: his predecessor, William McKinley, had been assassinated. Roosevelt was widely known as a rugged man of action, having led the US Volunteer Cavalry, known as the Rough Riders, during the Spanish–American War of 1898. When Vida met him on 1 March 1902 his extroverted personality and ‘cowboy’ persona were already legendary – but rather contradicted by his bespectacled, somewhat schoolteacherish appearance.
Vida described him as a little above average height, erect, square-shouldered and ‘every inch a soldier’. Roosevelt’s overt militarism would probably have been less than appealing to her, but a president is a president, and being summoned to his presence was naturally a great honour. She described the encounter in detail for the benefit of Sphere readers.
Mr Roosevelt I saw in his private office at the White House. When I entered the room, he was standing in a corner with another gentleman, to whom he was saying in the forcible, emphatic way he has of speaking: ‘Now you go straight back and tell him that if I give him that appointment, I say he’s-got-to-saw-his-own-wood.’ He had one foot up on a chair, and with every word he struck his knee, to further emphasise the fact that no one need expect an appointment from him who was not prepared to work. Mr Roosevelt has no use for figureheads.
He was just concluding his conversation as we entered and he came forward immediately. I was introduced to him and he said, gripping my hand in a vice, ‘I am delighted to meet you.’ All Americans say that, and you often feel that it is a mere façon de parler, but there was no doubting the cordiality of Mr Roosevelt’s greeting. ‘And you’re from Australia? I’m delighted to hear that. Do you know I’m very interested in your country, and in New Zealand, which seems to be making great progress. Of course you know I had a number of Australians in my regiment?’ [Roosevelt probably had three Australians in his Rough Riders regiment: George Osborne of Bungendore, NSW; John Drew of Hobart; and possibly Charles Ross.]
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And you found them good men and true?’
‘Excellent, excellent.’
The president added that he hoped to visit Australia and, presumably mindful of his rugged image, added, ‘If ever I go to your country I think I should feel much more at home on a buck jumper than I would in your cities.’ Vida said she believed that his fighting qualities were ‘always directed against dishonesty and corruption in business and politics’. They shook hands and said goodbye to each other with great cordiality.
On the way out she met Jacob Riis, a great friend of Roosevelt’s, who asked her eagerly, ‘Well, what did you think of our Teddy?’
‘I thought he was great,’ she said, and Riis agreed enthusiastically. Straight-faced, Vida added, ‘When I go back to Australia I’m going to put Mr Roosevelt’s photo up in my office with the Stars and Stripes around it, and if ever he does anything that is unworthy of the man I take him to be, I’ll turn his photograph to the wall and put the Stars and Stripes upside down.’
Riis appeared horrified by the very thought. ‘Oh, you’ll never have to do that,’ he said. ‘Teddy’s just olright.’13
Vida’s enjoyment at meeting President Roosevelt was evidently enhanced by her pleasure in sending him up to his colleague. Her reaction to meeting Carrie Chapman Catt, someone she greatly admired, had been very different.
After leaving Washington she went to Philadelphia, where she spoke about the Australian and New Zealand experience of suffrage at a range of meetings. And on 24 April she was delighted to report the news that at last the Australian parliament had signed into law the Commonwealth Franchise Bill.
Being feted as the representative of a progressive country, giving lectures to various admiring groups and with no immediate plans to return to Australia, it is no wonder that Vida was thoroughly enjoying herself. But she had not lost sight of the other work asked of her: to investigate aspects of the US social system, especially the treatment of disadvantaged children, as well as labour conditions and the American criminal code.
Like Julia Gillard a century later, Vida believed that education was the key to women’s advancement – and, like Gillard at one point in her career as prime minister, Vida believed that the American system had something to teach Australia. American children, Vida said, were encouraged to express themselves and to present arguments in debates, which she believed to be vastly superior to ‘merely instructive methods which most of us Australians have been victims to in our youth’. (How Vida would have regarded Gillard’s introduction of the NAPLAN system, with its periodic tests, is an interesting thought.)14
In New York she scorned the Statue of Liberty, which she thought demonstrated hypocrisy: ‘What a mockery it is! The Statue of Liberty a woman!’15 She visited welfare societies where, she said, she found nothing to equal the Australian system of dealing with neglected children. She did think it admirable that in the USA crime was treated as a disease, much like alcoholism, rather than as a failure or defect of character.
Vida’s lecture tour, for this is what it turned out to be, took in a large part of the USA’s east coast and some of the Midwest. She was well received everywhere she went, and her speeches were widely reported. In Indianapolis she was given a warm welcome by the German women of the city, who thought her family name showed she was one of them. She had to demur, saying she couldn’t possibly consider herself German with an Irish father and an Australian mother. She never, then or later, emphasised her father’s Jewish background. Some provincial papers considered her an oddity as an Australian, even while they applauded what she said. ‘The frills and furbelows that have been hung around some of my most innocent remarks have amused me, and sometimes vexed me,’ she reported to Australian Woman’s Sphere readers. ‘Some of them have even reported interviews that have never taken place.’16
Vida and her small tin trunk travelled long distances by train, which enabled her to observe American customs on public transport. She was appalled by the habit of chewing tobacco and spitting; there were spittoons in all railway carriages. ‘Oh how I wish I could give you some idea of the agony I suffered,’ she told her readers. ‘Men expectorating to the right of me, men expectorating to the left of me, men expectorating all round me, and when finally a woman in the opposite section to me followed suit, I nearly expired.’ She summoned the conductor and moved herself and her baggage to the parlour car. ‘The all sorts – and conditions – car is a very democratic idea, and I am a thorough going democrat, but – I like a clean democracy.’
The other habit she deplored was the chewing of gum:
I know of nothing more calculated to set all your nerves twanging than to sit in a street car or elevated train and watch half a dozen men, women and children opposite you chew, chew, chewing as hard as they can go . . . I remember one day on a three-hour railway journey, a bride and bridegroom were sitting in front of me, both chewing vigorously . . . When a man and a woman marry, it is quite the most desirable thing that their two hearts should beat as one, but it is a little trying for other people that they should decide to go through life with their jaws working in perfect unison.17
Vida came back to San Francisco in June before departing for Australia on 24 July. ‘Although I have had a perfectly delightful visit, it has been real hard work all the time,’ she told the Sphere’s readers. ‘Travelling on trains, living in one’s trunks, speaking everywhere I went, visiting penal establishments, charitable institutions, schools, universities – you can draw a mental picture of what I have been through and yet I don’t think you will be able to form any idea of what the whirl and the rush has been. And you can’t imagine what wholly delightful invitations for theatres, concerts and pleasure trips I have had to refuse, because with only a limited stay in each place, I have had to put work first and pleasure second.’18
On 16 August Vida returned to Sydney, where she stayed with Rose Scott again. She had been away for about five months. She was welcomed home to Melbourne on 26 August at a public function at the Masonic Hall, Collins Street, presided over by Sir William Lyne, the man who had championed and pushed through the federal suffrage bill and who was therefore a feminist hero. The Melbourne Women’s Progressive Association, formed in Vida’s absence, elected her president. There was a long list of speakers representing groups associated with Vida’s trip, and Vida herself spoke for an hour.
She wrote an open letter to the women of America, which she published in the Sphere in December, acknowledging that American women had been the first in the world to organise for educational, social, legal and political equality with men: ‘The little band of women, headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who met at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, must forever be enshrined in the hearts of women suffragists the world over, as also will be little Wyoming, the first state to enfranchise its women, as far back as 1869, just two years after John Stuart Mill’s suffrage amendment in the House of Commons.’
Vida also told her American sisters what she believed they needed to do to achieve the universal vote:
You want, and must have, the support of the rank and file of the working people. And just here is your weakness, you haven’t got it . . . every social reform worth having has been won only through getting the support of the workers. It is they who feel the need for reform most, because it is they who suffer most in our present social conditions . . . You want the vote in order that you may help to bring about better social and industrial conditions, but you won’t get it without the help of the industrial section of the country . . . That is how we got it in Australia, and as soon as you make the workers of America realise that the suffrage question is a great economic question, they will join hands with you.19
As has often been noted, the movement for the vote in Australia was generally led by middle-class women, and Vida must have realised this. She might have let her passionate support of unions and unionism run away with her here. And at the Trades Hall Council after her return she spoke eloquently about American industrial problems. ‘I am not optimistic about the industrial scene in America because Americans are not prepared to be labourers and they import immigrants to do menial tasks,’ she said. ‘All the immigrants wish to climb the social ladder and get ahead, which is difficult for unions without the solidarity of a united body. I fear a tremendous upheaval between capital and labour. Americans are opposed to compulsory arbitration and conciliation and factory inspections are often farcical, with many inspectors in the pay of the employers.’20
She was in a similarly thoughtful frame of mind when she gave an interview to the Australian Star newspaper. This time she spoke about the American prison system. ‘They pay attention to the reformatory side,’ she said. ‘Our system is simply punitive.’ She also gave a slightly different slant, and perhaps a surprising one, to the struggle for the vote. ‘I believe women will not use their vote hastily, and they will probably vote along similar lines to men,’ she said. ‘And I believe that men would support a woman parliamentary candidate more readily than women, because they have a broader education and realise that the logical outcome of giving women the vote is that women will stand for Parliament.’ When she was asked about the possibility of a woman forming a government, her reply was: ‘If a woman had the talent, you could not stop her.’21 But she did not support the idea of an all-woman Cabinet, because she believed that men and women should act together, in parliament and at home.
At this stage of her career, then, Vida was no feminist separatist. She also seems to have been realistic, pragmatic or cynical enough to believe that society would not necessarily be improved by giving women the vote. And as it happened, many years later she was proved right in her view that women would not necessarily support a woman who formed a government, either to get there or to stay there.
Popular interest in Vida’s trip to the USA was so widespread that she decided to give lectures about it to as comprehensive an audience as possible. She undertook to travel throughout Victoria and to charge admission – she was always determined to pay her own way whenever possible. She needed to recover her costs, but might have had another motive: to gauge the reception she might expect if she decided to stand for parliament.
She called her public lecture ‘To America and Back’ and advertised it as ‘Cheapest trip on record!’ She illustrated the lecture, which was basically a narrative of the trip, with fifty stereopticon slides she had brought from the USA – the 1903 equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation. A stereopticon, whose use had been popular for about fifty years though its technology had existed since the seventeenth century, projected a photograph by means of two lenses arranged to give the illusion of a three-dimensional image.
Because Vida wanted her lecture to be entertaining and lightly informative, she largely steered clear of the analysis she had provided in interviews and in her Sphere dispatches from the United States, concentrating instead on anecdotes and comments about the manners and customs of her American hosts.
She gave her first lecture, with slides, on 28 October in Melbourne, introduced by Alfred Deakin (their relationship was always cordial, though they were never close friends). After a quick precis of her trip, she mentioned some of the things that she had found odd or surprising, some of which would be familiar today. She had been disconcerted to find that Americans generally knew so little about Australia. ‘Many were surprised to find I was white, others that I spoke English so well,’ she declared to appreciative laughter. She was intrigued by the American attachment to rocking chairs, which seemed to be everywhere in people’s houses, even in the bathroom: ‘It is considered cruel to refuse one to a prisoner, and a sentence of five years without a rocking chair is reserved for a crime of a very terrible nature.’ Still, she had to admit she found them soothing. ‘After ten minutes I was rocking as madly as everyone else,’ she said. These and other comments were well received, in country towns and in the city, and she published her illustrated lecture in a small booklet, which she also titled ‘To America and Back.’
The work Vida did in the United States was extended by other Australian woman visitors. The journalist Alice Henry, who went to the USA several years later, made use of some of Vida’s contacts in her Chicago work for labour reform, as did Miles Franklin when she worked with Henry. Both women gave Vida due credit.
As was common at the time, and especially since Vida had been a visitor from a land far away, her US autograph book was crammed with messages of goodwill from an impressive number of people, men and women. She kept this little book all her life; it is preserved among her papers. It contains affectionate messages from her new friends Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as well as Charlotte Perkins Gillman, author of the extraordinary and influential story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’; Gillman’s work was later published in the Australian Woman’s Sphere. The poet and author Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the words to ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’, also greeted Vida warmly. One male contributor was moved to express his thoughts in verse:
Empanoplied to plead the women’s cause
Armed with the record of your land’s great deeds
Welcome, light-bringer from the Southern Cross!