Thirty Years in Australia

by Ada Cambridge

Close about me lie piers, ships, boat-slips, collections of anchors, buoys, boilers, the old bones of dead vessels once so bravely alive—more alive, as I think, than anything else that hand of man has made; everything that meets the eye suggests the sea in some form. "The fishing village" is a newspaper term for the place, and when I was coming to live in it every other letter that I received condoled with me on my being obliged to do so. It is not a village; it is not more fishy than other towns along the shore; and I have never pitied myself for belonging to it. The fact that it is not a watering-place, with an esplanade and summer boarders, pleases me. It could easily have rivalled the "residential suburbs" across the way, which are cooled by the sea-breezes on one side only and not on three; but far be it from me to put such an idea into its head. Let it jog along in its unfashionable, unenterprising, unbusiness-like way while I am of it, and begin its hustling—as it will do sooner or later, if the powers that be allow our limbs to move again—when I am gone. It is a treat to find something that does not know how to advertise itself, nor want to know.

In this humdrum place, that is so cool and quiet, and to me so congenial, there is but one interesting walk. That is to say, but one that I consider worth giving an afternoon to. G. says he gets tired of it; I do not; and I am sure that Bob, the fox terrier, spends the week looking forward to it. The three of us ramble off together on Saturdays after lunch, weather and other circumstances permitting, and our faces turn the one way automatically.

We go "along the front"—i.e., the one-sided street that fronts Hobson's Bay—until the little marine stores and cook-shops and sailors' pubs lose themselves in a wilderness of docks and railway yards and buildings, lonely and grass-grown since the river and the port opposite took so much of our shipping from us, though there was a partial return to some of the activities of former days while the war was going on. Seldom a Saturday then that we did not find ourselves blocked by rows of trucks shunting back and forth across our short cuts, carrying hay or horses to the steamers whose clacking windlasses we heard from the neighbouring piers.

First we come to the yard within which lies the Graving Dock—once so wonderful, now so inadequate, but seldom empty and always interesting, no matter how insignificant the vessel on the chocks. Those weather-worn tramps that fight the unseen Powers at a disadvantage in everything, except courage and seamanship, are the ones I like to look at best. Sometimes we are asked on board, and a rough old salt, hero of untold brave deeds, shows us round and gives us tea, and feels himself honoured by the visit of persons not worthy to brush his shoes. These casual entertainments are my delight. Sometimes the captain's wife is cicerone and hostess. There was a whole family in one case, including a melancholy and discontented girl, who had a piano to practise on, and whose sad lot I was not too sea-crazy to understand. I sent her a bundle of old novels to vary the monotony, which was perhaps a cruel kindness.

Now and then tragedy comes upon the scene. A wreck is dragged in to be operated on. Some poor ship that has had a fire at sea, or her nose smashed or her side ripped open in a collision, or who has drifted for weeks with her propeller gone, lies naked before us with her wounds exposed; and then I stand and gaze and imagine things until G. gets cross because I cannot drag myself away. When the Ormuz had that accident in the Rip she so tightly filled the dock that her skeleton bow was almost within my touch. No more do I wonder at what ships can go through, having seen how that giant frame was put together. I went down to the bottom of the dock and held up the great hull in the palms of my hands. It was a strange sensation.

From the dock we pass by devious ways from yard to yard and pier to pier, descending and climbing, turning narrow corners, poking walking-stick or umbrella into the tufts of coarse grass and scrap-heaps of rusted iron or sea-rotted timber where Bob has his exciting hunts for the rats he smells but never catches. "No admittance except on business" is a legend with no meaning for us. If it rains, or the sun is over-hot, we retire to a dark and spacious shed where rows of gas buoys await their turn to shine beneficent in the stormy nights. Impressive creatures they are when viewed so near. Now and again we are shown torpedoes and compressed-air engines and such things, but as a rule we are not sight-seeing in a business way and do not desire company.

So we drift to the outermost pier of all—the Breakwater, half of which is stone rampart between Hobson's Bay and Port Phillip Bay, which stands to us for open sea. We sit as long as Bob's patience holds out on the bulkhead at the extreme end, and watch the ships go past us—so near sometimes that we could toss a biscuit on to a deck. They are intercolonial steamers that have started from a Melbourne wharf or are bound thither; the great liners, of which few are visible at this end of the week, take a more distant track. In the yachting season the blue water is sprinkled with white sails; we follow the manœuvres of the boats we know, and wait to see the winner come home, if she is not too long about it. Several times I have been aboard one of those racing cutters in a "sailing wind," and—I refrain from rhapsodising on the subject.

If the afternoon is still young we stroll on around the point, along that sea-wall which was built by convict labour—significant words, recalling days we do not care to think of. The wall is broken down in places, and stays so; this is the "old part" as the old times left it—some day to be repaired and used, but gently going to pieces in the meantime. All around us here we feel the spirit of those old times, so stern and sad. Close by is the spot where Commandant Price was murdered. It was before my time, but I have heard the tale of his life and death from friends and relatives, co-officials and eye-witnesses, authorities whom the author of His Natural Life never had opportunity to consult. They say—of course I can only take their word—that he was a brave and just, if undoubtedly hard, man, and that Frere in His Natural Life, supposed to be a portrait of him, is a cruel caricature. One of his official colleagues, who was also one of the kindest and most high-minded of men, solemnly assured me that what he did was "what he had to do" and represented to him his duty.

And just here, until a short time ago, lay the strangest little graveyard that I ever knew. Its enclosing walls had fallen into rubbish-heaps amongst the grass, which looked too thick and rank to safely walk in except when summer heats had dried it up; then we would prowl gingerly amid the forgotten graves—forty years old and upwards—and read the touching legends on the dilapidated headstones, which showed, amongst other things, that John Price was not the only one done to death "in the execution of his duty." Here lay a whole little world of people as utterly of the past as if they had lived centuries ago. Periodically someone protested in the local papers against the disgraceful condition of this lone bit of land, and at last the town decided to transfer its contents to the present cemetery. In a corner of that pretty garden they dug one big grave to accommodate the remains of what they calculated would be between two and three hundred bodies. The number found was nearly a thousand. I saw them stacked in little boxes, like a grocer's stock of tea or candles, half in the new grave, half piled on the brink. Several pathetic secrets that Mother Earth might well have kept to herself were dragged to light, and I am sure it must have been impossible to avoid mixing the fragments up. The new grave now looks very neat, slabbed all over; and the old burial-ground is ready to build on whenever good times arrive. But when we walk past the spot we miss something. We feel that we liked it best as it was.

Usually we do not go beyond this point. We scramble out to the furthest tenable boulder, and sit with our faces to the water, and watch the practice of the big gun of the fort close by, firing at a buoyed flag; and tease crabs, and lay plans for going Home some day, until it is time to return. But we can go on along the shore until we all but complete the circuit of the town, which is really a good walk for cold weather.