Twenty Years of My Life

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

At the Melbourne University I formed one intimate friendship, which has lasted ever since. Among my fellow-students was Dr. George Ernest Morrison, the famous Times correspondent of Peking. He was famous in those days as the finest football player in the Colony, and he began his adventures while he was at the University. For months we missed him; nobody knew where he was—or if his father, who was head master of Geelong College, did know, he never told. Then suddenly he turned up again, and said that he had been walking from Cape York, which was the northernmost point of Australia, to Melbourne. He had undertaken—and I don’t think he had any bet on it—to make his way from Cape York to Melbourne, alone, unarmed and without a penny in his pocket. In the northernmost part of his journey, at any rate, there were a great many wild blacks, and many rivers full of crocodiles to swim. But there are, of course, no large carnivora in Australia, and a snake can be killed with a stick. When he was swimming a river he used to construct a raft, and put his clothes and his pack on it; he carried a pack like any other sun-downer, and when he got to a station, did his bit of work to pay for his bed and supper, and when he left it, if the next station south was more than a day’s journey, he was given enough food to carry him through. This is, of course, the universal custom in Australia when a man is going from station to station in search of work, such as shearing.

He had not a single misadventure. The reason why he took so long was that his way from station to station naturally took him out of the direct line to the south, and he made a stay at some of them. The newspapers were so impressed with his feat that, shortly afterwards, when the Age organised an expedition to explore New Guinea, he was given command of it. That was the last I saw of Morrison till we met a few years afterwards at my house in London.

I never practised for the Melbourne Bar, for no sooner had I taken my law degree than I was appointed to the vacant chair of Modern History in the University of Sydney.

I had, since I landed in Australia, made my debut as an author, and had already published two volumes of verse, Frithjof and Ingebjorg and Australian Lyrics. During the year that I held my chair, we had apartments in the Old Government House, Parramatta, which had become a boarding-house, and spent our vacations on the Hawkesbury and in the Blue Mountains.

While I was at Parramatta I published a third volume of verse, A Poetry of Exiles.

Then occurred an event which deprived me of one of my principal reasons for remaining in Australia, the premature death of my uncle. This closed my short cut to a political career; and I had long since come to the conclusion that Australia was not the place for a literary career, because there was no real publishing in Australia. Publishers were merely booksellers, who acted as intermediaries between authors and printers; they took no risks of publication; the author paid, and they received one commission as publishers and another as booksellers. This did not signify much for verse; the printing bill for books of verse is not large, and poets are accustomed to bringing out their works at their own risk in other countries besides Australia. But a large prose work of a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand words is, at Australian prices, extremely expensive to produce, and when it is produced, has only a small sale because it does not bear the name of any well-known English publishing house.

So I suddenly made up my mind to return to England.

The five years I spent in Australia were fruitful for my career as an author, though I have never published anything about Australia, except my own verses, and anthologies of Australian verse, and a life, and an edition of the poems, of Adam Lindsay Gordon. The last was phenomenally successful; I am sure that no volume of Browning has ever sold so well. And one of the anthologies had a sale of twenty thousand copies in the first ten years of its existence.

Australia supplied exactly the right element for my development. At Cheltenham I was the most prominent boy of my time, and the prestige with which I came up from school gave me a certain momentum at Oxford. So I went out to Australia with a very good opinion of Public Schools, and Oxford, and myself.

I soon discovered that nothing was of any importance in Australia except sport and money. If Tennyson or Walter Scott had gone to a bush-township, he would have been judged merely by his proficiency or absence of proficiency as a groom. Horsemanship is the one test of the inhabitants of a bush-township.