Thirty Years in Australia

by Ada Cambridge

It was while living at Como that I "went to town" for the first and last time in many years. There is a gap in my diary where the happenings of November and December (1871) should have included this, but memory easily retains the correct impression of such a sharply-cut event.

We made the trip in a ramshackle little open buggy, consisting of a floor and two movable seats—a most useful country vehicle, upon which you could cart firewood or potatoes, when it was not wanted to cart human beings. We took a girl friend with us (the baby was left with the visiting sister-in-law), and our three portmanteaux; and one poor horse managed the journey in four or five days. We jogged along easily, as near the making railway as we could get, because the scrub had been cleared from that track more or less; camping in the shade at mid-day to lunch and rest the horse, and putting up for the night in a convenient township, taking our chances in the way of hotel accommodation, which was of all sorts. Rarely could we bring ourselves to make full use of the beds provided for us; we slept, as a rule, outside of them, in blankets of our own improvising.

When not far from Melbourne we fell in, towards evening, with the most ferocious thunder-storm of my experience—and that is saying a great deal. All we could do was to get ourselves and the horse away from the trees and the buggy, over the tyres and metal work of which the lightning ran like lighted spirit, and then stand doggedly—the horse with head and tail between his legs, we three tightly clasped together, our faces turned inward and hidden—and silently endure until the fury of the elements was past. When it was passed, and we drove drenched and dripping to the nearest hotel, which fussed over us with fires and hot drinks, it was found that my little portmanteau (frocks folded close in those days) had been put into the buggy that morning wrong side up. The deluging rain, running inside the flap, had saturated all my best clothes! My wedding-dress was done for; my next best gory all over with the dye from cerise ribbons that had lain next it; muslins and laces a flimsy pulp. And the ruin was irremediable, except in the case of the latter (I sent the two silks to be dyed black, and they were returned after some months stiff and crackly, so obviously dyed that they were no use as frocks again). Literally, I had not a stitch to wear. My companion lent me clothes while my travelling things were drying, and when I got to Melbourne I could hardly put my nose out of doors. Instead of enjoying myself with my friends, I had to scheme to hide myself from them—the only thing to be done, since I could not afford to repair my losses on the spot. As soon as G. had done his necessary business, we turned round and came home again.

We brought back with us the widow of that police magistrate who had dropped dead in his dressing-room at Como, and her baby. And we had the hottest of midsummer weather, and the fiercest of north winds. The tracks were deep in dust like sea-shore sand; our faces were skinned with the sun; we wilted on the hard buggy seats under our useless umbrellas; the poor horse gave up, and had to be left by the way. But all our concern was for the unfortunate infant. Whenever we came to sheltered water we used to get down and lay him in; we carried bottles of it with us to pour over him as we drove. We spent one night in a red-hot corrugated-iron hotel, and his mother and I sat up through the whole of it, taking turns at sponging him. He came through safely, although she lost him afterwards—her only son.

That abortive expedition was, as I have said, the last I made to Melbourne for a very long time. The Bush "township" became my world. When I speak of the Bush, it is understood that I do not mean a place of bushes. The term, with us, is equivalent to "the country"—the country generally, though particularly and originally its uncultivated parts. "The miserable Bush of Australia," poor Dik called it, and it has that character with many, I know; but—save, perhaps, at the first glance—it never struck me that way. In the exquisite lights, the clear distances, the fine atmosphere of this climate, Nature has to be beautiful, whatever she wears. I love her in this grey-green gown—and I have been a bushwoman for twenty-three years in all. The trouble is, of course, that man, who does not live by bread alone, lives still less on scenery.

We did not really settle down in W——. Life there was difficult and worrying on the professional side, and with every passing week we longed more to extricate ourselves from a position that we had seen at the beginning to be without promise of comfort or success. But on the social, the secular, side, we had nothing to complain of. We had not begun to miss the things we were cut off from, and the new experiences were delightful. So also with the domestic conditions. It was here that I mastered the rudiments of Bush housekeeping, and no lessons were ever more interesting.

I may say, at once, of my Bush life that, from the housekeeper's point of view, it has been full of comfort—always. This is, I suppose, chiefly because I have never had that servant trouble which seems to keep families in general in constant distress and turmoil. The Irish girl who took liberties with Dik was otherwise a willing and likeable person; the vinegary widow who followed her, and who, being the mother of a boy of twelve, made me put her down in the census paper as aged twenty-five, would have been considered an excellent servant in the most proper English household; and so would her successor, a smart lady who went to church o' Sundays in silks and velvets, and drank all our spirituous liquors that she could lay her hands on. And these were the slight, very slight, mistakes at the beginning. Since then I have had virtually unbroken peace. I have never had to "look for a girl," never been to a registry office, never wanted for the best. And I have never yet met the missus who could say the same. I have my own opinions on this servant question. They may be heterodox, but they work out all right, which is the main thing. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. At the same time I know that I have had exceptional luck. The dear servants and friends who did so much to make my life happy were born good.

One devoted nurse who was with me for many years postponed a fixed wedding-day three times, rather than leave me when she thought I needed her more than usual. "No," she said, inexorably, when I remonstrated with her on behalf of her poor young man, "I am going to see you better first." On the last occasion it was:—"I am not going to let you have the trouble of moving with only strangers to help you. I shall see you settled first." She married from the house at last, so collapsed with grief over the parting that she could not touch the wedding-breakfast we had prepared. The bridegroom sat about forlornly, while I struggled to rally her with brandy and water and (when I dared not give her more of that) tea; and she drove away with the cake whole in her box, drowned in tears. She was a strong-minded woman too, who as a rule never "gave way," whatever the rest of us did.

Another long-service paragon, an Irish woman with a warm temper, could not get on with the lady-helps—sub-housekeepers during the years that I had no health to speak of. "No, ma'am," she said, when their disputes were brought before me, "I'll do anything for you, but I won't take orders from a person who's no better than I am." Although servants like her were precious rarities, and lady-helps a drug in the market, I felt bound to stand by my representative—the intermediary whose position is always difficult; and so the result would be that the other got a week's notice there and then. It made no difference. She stayed on just the same, although I did not ask her. They all stayed on—only leaving us to be married, or owing to family circumstances over which they had no control. The present incumbent of the kitchen has occupied it for nearly nine years.

Living, i.e., feeding, in Australia is proverbially good, although the cooking is often unworthy of the material. Few in the land are, perhaps I should say were, they who do (or did) not sit down to a meat meal three times a day. Fruit that in England was nursed in orchard-houses and counted on south walls we could batten on now; a few pence would heap the sideboard with grapes or apricots, but all was so plentiful that it generally cost us nothing. Wine was not what it is now, and we could not at once break ourselves of our English beer; but it was not long before we learned to prefer the product of the local vineyards, to which we shall remain faithful to our lives' end. We got it, as we do still, in large stone jars, at less than the price of Bass or Guinness. With a poultry yard and a cow, and John Chinaman's vegetables, even a poor parson could live like a prince.