A strike was on, and we lay out in Sydney Harbour for two weeks and used to go ashore in a tender every evening. One night I went ashore and played at a private concert out at Pott’s Point, and stayed the night as well. It was a wedding festival, and my host and hostess were kind, Bohemian folk, relations of Sir Henry Parkes. I cannot remember their name. They used their influence and secured me a position to play at the Government House balls in Sydney. I did so well that I got my box off my ship and left.
At Government House I played as a solo my own composition, The Monk’s Dream, which I had arranged for violin and pianoforte, and A Soldier’s Dream Waltz, with variations. Among the audience was the present Lieutenant James Ord Hume, who was on a tour through Australia, as adjudicator for the great military and brass band contests of Australia and New Zealand. Hearing me play, and finding that the solo was my own composition, he complimented me, and asked me to go to see him at the Occidental Hotel. I had a very good time there, for he was most hospitable. He was then about to leave Sydney for Ballarat. “Would you like to come on a trip with us?” he said. “Certainly,” I answered, for I had a considerable amount of money just then and felt that a holiday would do me good. Mr Hume had not been to Ballarat before and was delighted with the scenery passing over the Blue Mountains.
In Ballarat we had various experiences, and I worked, digging for gold, down the chief gold mine, the War-Hoop Mine. We went outside the town and got into the bush too; for though Ballarat is a beautiful town, with splendid buildings, one can walk in a very short time right into the bush and see scenery equal to the Queensland landscape. The Botanical Gardens are also very beautiful and reveal patches of primeval Australia. We took snapshots of the Wendowee lakelet, because of the pretty little plump Colonial girls standing by the banks; they were nut-brown with the sun.
Mr Ord Hume went out to see a friend who lived in the bush, but we only stayed two nights. There was a stable and swamp near our bedroom window, and when, after enjoying the squatter’s hospitality and a musical evening, we went to bed, though we rubbed ourselves with kerosene oil and smoked, the mosquitoes charged down on our feet and faces in Hunnish regiments. At midnight we called our host, and he came to our door in his nightshirt and told us to rub some whisky on our faces and on our feet, and gave us a full bottle of the best brand. Directly he had gone we closed the door, wiped the sweat from our perspiring brows and drew the cork to rub our ravaged bodies.
“Don’t you think if we took the stuff internally and then smoked that our breath full of the fumes would keep the cursed mosquitoes off?” I suggested. Mr Hume quite agreed with my suggestion, which eventually turned out to be a most disastrous one for the mosquitoes, for we drank the whole bottle and then went to sleep, and never felt one mosquito bite the night through, nor did we wake till long after sunrise.
I think it was four days before the great band contest, which Mr Ord Hume was in Ballarat to adjudicate on, came off. The whole of Ballarat came to it. It was at that contest that I first became enthusiastic over bands. I felt the fire and go in the Australians’ performances; their bands cannot be beaten the world over.
We saw a good deal of life in Australia together before I left Lieutenant J. Ord Hume, a few weeks after the Ballarat concert, arranging to see him later in New Zealand, where he was going to adjudicate at other band contests.
I went as a passenger on a boat to New Zealand, and when I had been a few days in Auckland I saw by the newspapers that Mr Hume had arrived to judge the great New Zealand band competitions at Masterton and elsewhere. I managed to be there. The weather was glorious, also the applause of the New Zealanders as the bands marched by.
I travelled with Mr Hume by train over the Rimnatuka Mountain from Wellington to Masterton. It took three engines to take the train over the rocky ledges and slopes. The grade is one in fifteen in many places. The bush-land and mountain scenery is equal to anything in Australia, for the scenery of New Zealand is wildly magnificent.
After Mr Ord Hume had judged and conducted the massed band performances at Auckland he kindly invited me to join him, and we went off sight-seeing, visiting bush-lands, rivers and hot springs, old tribal battle spots and Maoris in their pahs. Maori guides led us up mountains and across volcanic chasms, and took a great deal of trouble on our behalf. They knew that Mr Ord Hume had specially come across the world to judge the bands, and so they took us everywhere as their guests.