Thirty Years in Australia

by Ada Cambridge

We spent the night in Ballarat, and after breakfast drove to L——, timing ourselves to get there for morning service, G. having taken duty for the day. It teemed. There was hardly any congregation in consequence, and the church was dark, cold, and dismal. Amongst the absentees was the organist, and I was called upon to play the selected music, without preparation, to a few watchful critics. They gave us a kindly welcome after service, and invitations to dinner and tea; after which we were able to inspect the parsonage in privacy. It had been empty for some weeks, and rain had rained on it for days. The picturesqueness of the photograph had been wholly washed away. We should have made allowances for all this, but when we found one room with the paper peeling from the wall, and another showing a wet patch, and when we sniffed the fusty, mouldy, shut-up air, we exclaimed to each other, "A damp house!" and there and then determined that it was impossible for us to go into it. We had lost two children; nothing should induce us to imperil the safety of the third.

At dinner, and again at tea, our entertainers apologised for the exceptional weather, and assured us that all was quite otherwise as a rule. The parsonage needed fires for a few days, perhaps a patch on the roof, possibly the clearing of leaves and birds' nests from the water-pipes. They answered for it that, when in order, it was a perfectly healthy house. I daresay they were right, for we never heard that the family of the clergyman who subsequently jumped at it took any harm while living there. But the possibility of its being damp was enough for us; we dared not risk it.

It was with some difficulty, and not without unpleasantness, that we backed out of the engagement we had deliberately made. It was our unexpected luck not to suffer more than we did. In the end, instead of declining upon a lower level in the matter of the next appointment, it fell to our lot to be promoted to what I think was considered at the time the most important country parish in the diocese.

Here, at anyrate, there was no fault to find with the parsonage house, unless one objected to its lonely situation—which we did not. As a parsonage house it was unique in Victoria, and I believe in Australia. The wayfaring stranger might have taken it for but another station homestead, on a smaller scale than most; as a fact, he frequently did, in the person of the professional sundowner.

We did not go there at once on leaving B——. Our first welcome was to one of the "mansions" in its neighbourhood—the seat, as it might be called, of the new squire of the parish—and such was the treatment we received in it that we remained there as visitors for nearly half a year. The lady of the house was young, and we became friends. She said, "Why should I be here by myself, while you are over there by yourself? Let us keep each other company." Never did I live in such utter ease and luxury. Men and maid-servants to wait on one at every turn, and to pet the year-old baby so that even her nurse found her place a sinecure; a dear old housekeeper continually pursuing me with "nourishment"; daily drives with my hostess, alone or with a cavalcade of more ephemeral guests—so numerous that we seemed to have a dinner-party every night; no domestic cares; no parish work—the conditions were not only pleasant, but most beneficial to my health. Meanwhile G. worked the parish from this base, using the horses and buggies of the establishment as if they were his own.

From July 25th, 1877, to January 8th of the following year, we lived this feather-bed life. Then our friends set us gently down upon our own premises—there had been a doubt as to whether they were to be our own, up to this time, which partly accounted for the delay—and started us in life again on our own base. A Brussels carpet from one, a set of tea-things from another—it was like the going to housekeeping of the newly-married. The buggy that finally took us to our fifth home was found on arrival packed with toothsome tokens of affection which the housekeeper had stuffed in at the last moment.

That fifth home was a survival of the old, old times—quite the beginnings of the colony. In those old times, before townships were, the princely pioneer squatters (our late host the chief), wishing to have their church represented amongst them, made a first gift for the purpose of one hundred acres of their fat lands and a house—the nucleus of this house. It was an inalienable endowment, not to any parish—for there was none—but to the incumbent for the time being; so that afterwards, when it came to belong to a parish, whose centre of town and church was six miles off, the vestry could not turn it into money, as they desired, so as to bring their parson to headquarters.

The first incumbent—a D.D. eminent in the Church and in the history of the Western District, a pioneer himself, whose name is now perpetuated in a Trinity College scholarship—began his long ministry as a missionary at large. He saw all the changes that turned that fertile wilderness into the garden of Victoria, studded with wealthy homesteads and prosperous towns, while sitting, as Dik would say, upon his own valuable bit of it, living the same pastoral life as the squatters around him. The reader will remember that the term "squatter," with us, means roughly the landed gentry; in its original sense the word has no meaning now.

In his old age Dr R. went "home" for a holiday, leaving two curates in charge. Shortly before he was expected back, came the news of his death, and, after a sorrowful time of inaction on the part of the mourning parish, G. was selected to take his place. It was always impressed upon us that it was to take his place, not to fill it, which nobody could do.

For six years we lived as he lived. Then the authorities six miles off decided to put an end to the old régime. Incumbent No. 3 had to be brought into line with other incumbents somehow. His property could not be sold, but apparently (with his consent, I presume) it could be let; for let it was, as soon as we had vacated it. Tenants of a class to suit the house needed more than a hundred acres of land with it, so it was let to a farmer, an ex-free-selector, whose selection adjoined. He took up his abode in what we called the "old part"—the original house (our kitchens, store-rooms, etc.), to which, according to Bush custom, another and better had been attached, the two being connected by a planked, bark-roofed, trellis-walled passage; and he used my drawing-room and our other living-rooms to stack his produce in. And the parson went to live in the town, beside his church—in a corrugated iron house that was run up for him.