Thirty Years in Australia

by Ada Cambridge

We passed, in dripping mackintoshes, across the little platform lonely in the scrub—there is a considerable station there now, and the Mount is populous with country-houses—to the covered waggonette awaiting us. Up the steep and miry Bush track, then like any other Bush track, the poor horses strained and struggled, slipped and fell. The men had to get out and do the climb on foot. It was pitchy dark, and the trees closed us round. But presently we turned in at a gate and passed through the perfect garden to the lighted house—the blazing bedroom fire to dress by, the glowing drawing-room hearth to gather around afterwards, the exhilarating dinner and evening talk. Mr Forbes had just come from New Zealand, and that country had enchanted him. He had roamed the earth—Switzerland, Norway, the Rockies, the Yosemite, all the famous beauty spots—but never, he declared, had he seen anything to match New Zealand scenery. A coach drive through the Otira Gorge had simply turned his head. The husband of the flower-painter had captained British troops in the Maori wars, and the house happened to possess a fine collection of New Zealand photographs, bound in several volumes. These I spent a long Sunday morning over, while Mr Forbes descanted upon the pages as I turned them. I made a promise to myself and him that not many years should pass before I saw the originals of those pictures, but—as a matter of course—I have not seen them yet. In my sadder moments I am convinced that I never shall. There was no church upon the mountain then—only a little school-house where, on alternate Sunday afternoons, an Anglican clergyman took a turn with his Presbyterian brother; on such occasions we ladies of the house brushed through the bracken-fern and woodland scrub to the humble tabernacle. My hostess played the harmonium; the potential Personage of the family led the singing. But on this wet and wintry Sunday we stayed at home. I had much friendly intercourse with our chief guest, and we corresponded afterwards. This was about four months before the gay time which included the Rosebery episode.

The diversions of that gay time soon palled upon me. I was glad to exchange my camp in town—lap of love as well as luxury though it was—for a home of my own, however 'umble. We collected ourselves in the little terrace house, which managed to hold us, a governess for the children included; and as soon as she had made us as comfortable as she could, Maria's ill-used young man came for her, and we lost a friend who could never be replaced. The 20th of February 1884 was her wedding-day, and no obsequies were ever celebrated with more pangs and tears.

Miss P., the new governess, was a treasure notwithstanding. A curate brother (he is a portly canon now), who wanted her for his housekeeper, reft her from me three months afterwards; and she is married, I hear, this long time, and I hope the man who has got her appreciates his luck. She had a handful with those children after Maria's influence was removed, but the way she managed them (in that confined space) made me envious of her moral vigour and the texture of her nerves.

When they were all disposed of for the night she and I used to take walks together. In my state of health, especially in the hot weather—and that was a particularly hot place—dressing and calling were too much for me; I waited until after dark, and then went out in about three garments, the most delightful costume that I ever wore in my life, and one to which I look back now with regret and longing unspeakable. Oh, why can we not relieve the inescapable fatigue of life in that way always, and not only for a few brief hours in thirty years! It was the heavenly fashion then to wear a long, light, loose paletot of China silk—the early dust-coat, before it had been spoiled. It buttoned at the throat and all down the front to the hem, which cleared the ground by about three inches. It had roomy pockets outside; the sleeves were roomy also; there was no need to wear a dress under it, nor anything whatever round the waist. I did not, and so walked with the sensations (as I should imagine them) of a disembodied spirit.

Night after night, in this delicious liberty, we roamed that city everywhere. It is a big city—the third in the state—with its due proportion of dens and slums, of drunks and larrikins, but there was not a hole or corner that we feared or had cause to fear. She, calm, strong, protective, was the man of the pair; I, with my hand on her arm, could wish no better. It was our joy to wander in the most out-of-the-way places, and to find a new one if possible every night. We watched trains from black railway embankments; we sat in the public gardens away from lamps and out of call of people; we poked into blind alleys and prowled over deserted mines—and we were never molested or annoyed by anybody or anything. One day we read, with high indignation, a letter in the newspaper which represented the town as so rowdy at night-time that it was not safe for decent people to be abroad. I became a newspaper controversialist myself, for once, in order to confute that gratuitous liar, who, I am quite sure, was not a decent person. The manners of our people may not be superfine, and in fact they are not—there was no justification for the fastidiousness of some persons who could not see any good in Archibald Forbes because he drank his tea out of the saucer instead of the cup—but in the conduct at the back of manners I have always found them decent to the decent, in whatever walk of life.

The pokiness of the poky house did not trouble me, but its situation was detestable. Never will I live in a terrace house again, if I can help it. I used to hunt in vain for a quiet corner to write in, for I am not like my friend, "Rolf Boldrewood," who can calmly pursue his literary labours in a roomful of noisy family. If I settled myself at the rear of the premises, the maid next door would take the opportunity to sing in her back-yard at the top of her voice, and, in view of the performances of the children in mine, I was not in a position to expostulate. If I fled to the front, I was distracted with the rattle of the street and the horrible jingle of a public-house piano out of tune. In the stilly night one had sometimes to bury one's head in the bed-clothes to avoid hearing the conversations of the husband and wife in the next house. Their window was close alongside ours, and we had to open them in summer to enable us to breathe. Twice a week or so G. used to go out with his broom and pail of disinfectant, and, starting at the top of the terrace, flush and sweep the main gutter of all the houses down to the bottom—and then was summoned for creating a nuisance, because the overflow of a neighbour's nastiness, from an unreachable source, was detected in our ground. We had good reason to believe that this deadly insult (to persons who made domestic sanitation a fad, if not a passion) was contrived as a punishment for his impertinence in meddling with other people's drains. One or two of them used to stand at their yard doors and look at him sourly while he was doing it, but it was the only way of cleansing our own.

In spite of these drawbacks, our sojourn here was pleasant. There was no hardship in being curate to such an incumbent as Archdeacon M'C., beloved by all who knew him. The taste of town life was sweet, after so many years of rural isolation. My friends were near, dropping in continually, between one train and another, as they passed up and down on the railway; and, best of all, there were the most "filling" library and reading-rooms, conveniently near to me, that I had ever had the run of. My pleasantest memories of this particular year are of that institution and the grave, grey, bookish old librarian, who did all he knew to make it delightful to me. Though I never saw him after '84, he has his place in the little company of true friends made for life; "gone, but not forgotten," as the obituary column says of a baby buried yesterday—I have not forgotten him in seventeen years, nor ever shall. We used to talk books by the hour when he was disengaged. He hoarded volumes for me in the secret recesses of his desk, and of the new publications coming in I always had my choice before they were put upon the shelves. It mattered not that I was entitled to but one or two at a time, the more I would accept in excess of my allowance, the better he was pleased. Sometimes he left them at my door on his way home to bed, although my door was out of his road. And I never was at a loss for recreation with those reading-rooms to browse in—green pastures and still waters for the fattening and refreshing of mind and soul. They alone would have made any place good to live in.

Just before Christmas, 1884, Bishop Moorhouse offered G. the parish which was our favourite of the whole series—for six months. A clergyman in England, belonging to one of our old families, already mentioned, had a wish to return to his own people. He offered himself unconditionally to the Bishop of Melbourne, who responded by appointing him to this parish, up in the northeastern mountain country, in the neighbourhood of our early homes; and G. was to take charge of it until its incumbent-elect was ready. The latter, finding it beneath his expectations, and being simultaneously offered a London living, decided, after long deliberations, to remain where he was; and we, who went there for six months, stayed nine years. It was so congenial a place, that when (June 12, 1885) news came up to us that the Board of Nominators in Melbourne had elected G. to the incumbency, we said to each other that we had nothing left to wish for. To be safe and settled once more had been our anxious desire for some months; we now felt that if we had had our choice of all the districts and dwellings in the diocese, we could not have suited ourselves better.

But first we had to pay toll—heavy toll. My health continued to fail, so that I could not enjoy my pretty home, and the end of years of stop-gap doctoring was the announcement that it was useless, and that radical measures must be resorted to. On March 9, 1886, I was deposited in a private hospital in Melbourne, fully aware of the fact that my case was considered serious enough to make it as likely as not that I should die there. Of all the black hours of my life, I think that was the worst—when my husband had said good-bye to me and gone back to the children whom I dared not hope to see again, and I was left to my hard fate (on a very hard bed) amongst cold-eyed strangers to whom I was of no account whatever, except in the way of business. Once, when I was a child under governesses, I took a violent fancy to go to boarding-school; I pestered doting parents until they reluctantly acceded to my wish; but no sooner was it realised than I began to weep and pine away with a home-sickness that could only be cured by fetching me back again—I think at the end of the first quarter. That brief experience of exile from the Place of Love faintly foreshadowed my mental sufferings—worse than the physical ones, which were indeed no joke—under this bitterer separation; yet both school and hospital did their best for me, and were governed with all the kindness and good-will that discipline and the general conditions admitted of.

For months, that seemed years, I was imprisoned in the latter place—even now I cannot pass it without a shudder, a thrill of thankfulness to be outside instead of in—and I was then sent forth with a reprieve only, and not a full discharge. The nurse, strange to say, gave me the hint that I should probably "die of it" shortly; the doctor, appealed to for the honest truth, first abused the nurse for her indiscretion, and then endorsed her view. But nurses and doctors have their human limitations; even they don't know everything. The kindly reader may like to hear that I not only did not die of it, but am in no danger of ever doing so.