I had a good wash and brush up and soon looked very different to what I did when those sailors first discovered me, begrimed, smothered in coal dust and perspiration. There I was, once more thrown up on the beach in Sydney.
I will draw a veil over a good many of the days of my life after that time. I fell in with the ne’er-do-wells of the Australian cities, the happy-go-lucky castaways of “better times,” who slept out on the “Domain,” in dustbins and in the cave holes of the rocky shore round by the Botanical Gardens, where you could sleep and hear the waters creeping, singing up the shore by your pillow all night long, as you slept a penniless beggar far from your native land. You could open your eyes in the silent hours of the night and see the outbound sailing ships as the rigging flitted across the moonlight and the crew sang some homebound song as the ship met the outer foams and started on the long, long track home. The awful stench from Woolloomoolloo Bay came on the wind round the bend at intervals, like the hot breath of reality across your dreams.
I read some wonderful poems in those days, sad ones too, poems with weary eyes that told the remorse, the long remembering, but not the tale itself. Dressed in rags I have seen them sleeping on “the rocks” as the white Australian moonlight revealed pinched refined faces; men they were from the cities of the world, who were hiding from their homeland disgrace, and some who had believed the Arabian Night tales from the Land of the Golden Fleece, sold up their all in England to sink to the lowest depths of poverty and humiliation in the country where it is every man for himself and God for the lot.
How well I remember that time and those nights among the Lost Brigade, as they slept huddled around me on the matting of the “Donkey’s Breakfast,” as they call the bunk mattresses which are thrown away and piled up in wharf sheds when emigrant ships arrive. Snoring wrecks, a few with low-bred faces who could not read or write and others with refined-looking faces notwithstanding the scrubby beard that half hid them, many boys also around, too shabby to get work and too wretched to want it. One young fellow, through starvation and homesickness, went off his head. He had an emotional, girlish face and was not more than eighteen years of age. We cheered him up and I’m sure I did my best, but he would keep muttering to himself and swore that spirits were charging him in regiments all night long as he howled and brandished his arms about fighting them. One night he got up and ran off; we heard a splash in the bay. He was buried out at “Rookwood” with the hundreds of others who sleep in nameless graves, forgotten for years, till Lloyd’s Weekly says, “Wanted, the whereabouts of A. B.; left home in the year ——. Mother inquires.”
I have been telling you the seamy side of the life of the seaboard cities. Of course it is not all seamy. Sydney flourishes and is happy, with her big streets, her skirts dipping into the bay, her bright Botanical Gardens, a kind of tropical Hyde Park kissed by curling sea waves, and near those gardens is the wide Domain. What a happy hunting-ground for an Australian Charles Dickens that Domain would have been, and still is! The emigrants still go seaward and are dumped down to scramble to hell or dubious fame and fortune, while the ships go flying homeward to old England full up with the remnants who landed on the preceding voyage out!
After coming ashore from my stowaway trip, I lodged in a small top room in Lower George Street, which was very different to Upper George Street. By my dwelling-house the Chinese lived in their opium dens. Some of them were very well off and had managed to secure white wives. How those white women could stand them I don’t know. At sundown they would stand by their den doors and looked like mummies peeping from their upright coffins with twinkling eyes! Wrinkled yellow faces they had, and you could always tell their presence by the peculiar smell that came in faint whiffs from their shop doors mingled with the odour of orange pekoe, for they mostly sold tea or pretended to, but really played “fan-tan” in those gambling dens, and did other awful things as the innocent old shrivelled spy stood at the door watching, picking his yellow teeth with a long skewer. No one in Australia has ever seen a Chinaman drunk; he takes his opium and nectar in an arm-chair in the stuffy room at the back of his shop, and with his long opium pipe in his mouth goes off back to China in dreams, when his stupefied head no longer hears the traffic outside as the crowds hurry by and the Jack Tars from the men-o’-war boats in the bay go rollicking up the street “half seas over,” singing, arm in arm, and inside that innocent-looking den the white wife goes through the celestial’s pockets as the Australian “bum” stands up at the street corner waiting with greedy hand to receive his half. Five hundred yards up the street stood the splendid post office and all the business shops of the commercial world of Sydney.
Cabbage-tree Palms and Bush Land
After a month’s stay in the town I once more went up country and secured work on a station, staying there nearly nine months. I became quite colonised as I toiled in the pumpkin fields, rode for miles over the slopes behind the flying sheep, and slept in a little outhouse by the stockman’s homestead. I would sit and dream of home as over my head the parrots wheeled away toward the sunset and the station children romped and screamed with laughter. Sometimes as I sat thinking and remembering my mind wandered back to Queensland and Ethel’s grave in the bush. I often lay in that little hut unable to sleep till dawn crept over the gum tops and the lyre-bird’s song chimed the first peeps of sunrise over the hills. Two miles away was another station whereon worked two other young Englishmen. I often rode across the bush at sundown to see them and we would sit and yarn together about England, and all get homesick over our dreams. Dell, the youngest of the two, was thrown from his horse and killed. His friend William and I often went across at evening time and placed flowers on his grave and then walked away with thick throats, unable to speak to each other.