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CHAPTER I. EARLY DAYS (AND SOME OTHERS)

Table of Contents

I have been a wanderer all my days, in intent when not actually in action, so if I ramble a bit in these reminiscences it is from force of incurable habit.

I am reminded (I can't help this rambling) that in later years I discovered that an old friend, Jessie Stewart, had also been born on January 4. I sent her a card:

We are both of us modest folk, I hope,

Who would deprecate a fuss,

But I think they started the New Year well When they started it with Us!

One of my earliest recollections is of a day when I was playing in the front garden of our house in Houston Street. I was a very small boy indeed. There was a sudden rush of feet, a roar of angry men, and I looked through the fence to see a hatless stranger, racing literally for his life, pursued by a group of miners.

'Jumpers!' said someone, and on the word I was inside, and hiding behind my mother.

That was my share of the famous claim-jumping riots in Stawell when the 'Pleasant Creek Jumps Association' was formed in Ballarat to 'jump' certain Stawell gold mines about the validity of whose leases there was some doubt, and the diggers of my native town turned out in force to repel the invaders. That memory goes back a long way: I was about three years old at the time.

Earlier still is the memory of a warm afternoon, a summer day of the old type when extreme heat would persist for a week or more without a break. How old would I be? I had been 'put down' for the day-sleep of very young childhood, so I must have been a tiny boy indeed. There was a plate of fruit at my side when I woke. Through the mists of the years I am aware of that fact and that the house was empty (which probably impressed the scene on my mind); also I know that my people had all gone to the near-by dam of water because a boy had just been drowned there. I could name that unfortunate lad now.

Stawell, and school at No. 502, and the sand-heaps of the crushing batteries, and the busy mines, and all the world (and his wife and children) walking up and down Main Street on a Saturday night, and the peppermint-flavoured Presbyterian Church on Sunday mornings—at first St. Mark's, for did not my people break away from St. Matthew's and help to build a kirk of their ain?—and always and ever the Bush—these made up much of my early life. Then walks to the Big Hill, right in the town; to the Cemetery, to the Hospital, and with greater years greater distances—to the Black Range on a Saturday (where I tore critically my only trousers on one sad occasion and had to lurk in the rocks while the picnic with Her in it, proceeded gaily below) and finally to that goal of every youngster's dream in those days—the Grampians.

Is there anything more deplorable in humanity, by the way, than the desire to destroy Nature's fine work, the craving to buy a paltry prominence at the expense of some magnificent natural monument! The remarkable Sister Rocks near Stawell are covered from base to crown with names, painted or tarred or cut, the owners of which have even taken ladders to assist in the desecration. On the stone face of the Splitters' Falls in Hall's Gap in the Grampians (I blush!) are chiselled the names of three youths who now know better. Kindly Nature has modified my shame by covering those names with lichen, but they may still be traced by the curious, for they are cut deeply.

That was my first camp, just past Delly's Bridge in Hall's Gap. Bill Grant (afterwards General Grant, C.M.G., D.S.O., Order of the Nile and Bar), Bill Webster (later to become Chief Clerk of the Education Department), and myself were the trio. This trinity of bush-lovers increased at times to a quartette by the addition of Grant's cousin, Bill Blair, son of David Blair, the old historian of Australia, who, by the way, was the first man to encourage me to write. But that was to come much later. Bill Blair, coming all the way from Melbourne, was only an occasional partner.

My one school was the State School in Stawell, ruled over by Dick Davies ('Dick' was short for the incredible name Richard Zerubabel); a vigorous hearty man who administered firmly, but with humanity, and with a rare understanding of juvenile human nature. The odd things that linger in the mind after more than half a century!—I recall his coming into the junior second class (it was perched perilously in one of those abominations known as a gallery) and testing the class in spelling. Now I was good at spelling (no pun) and I scored until he gave me the word 'egg.' In retrospect I feel that my persistence in rendering it 'a-g-g' was a reflection upon the common pronunciation of the word rather than upon my abilities.

The teacher's life is not an easy one, but it has its compensations. A good teacher makes every year a new generation of friends who will honour his name in after days. Dick Davies was a fine man and he had a fine team. I wish, in gratitude, that I could say something here about each of those men and women, all now gone beyond the voices, who did so much for me, as for others. I shall mention two only—Tom Webster (a cousin of my lifelong friend Bill Webster) and that very successful and prominent man of business, F. J. Cato—the first because his influence upon me, as a member of the highest class in the school, was so stimulating; the other because of his remarkable progress, as one of the firm of Moran and Cato and because of his generous benefactions to charity in the years of his retirement. He abandoned schoolwork at an early age to take up commerce. My most vivid recollection of him at school is connected with a cane which he used across my shoulders one day in class. I'll bet that I deserved it.

It was a big school then, for the town was at the peak of its gold getting. Mines were indeed worth 'jumping' with the precious metal being produced literally by the ton. That is not overstating it. The Pleasant Creek Cross Reefs (known to us as the Duke) yielded 241,461 ounces in one period of eight years and eventually paid its shareholders £750,000 in dividends. One man held 2,000 shares: from 'Bill the Smelter' he became the Hon. W. H. Osmand, M.L.C. As a Legislative Councillor, by the way, he was noted, like the Harp of Tara, for his enduring silences—but that in passing. Crushing batteries, reducing the quartz to sand, thundered away from midnight Sunday to midnight Saturday without a pause. So continuous was the roar that no-one was aware of it until it stopped (is that an Irishism?). Then the old folk woke up, wondering at the stillness.

All the mines, and there were many, were working three shifts. A miner's pay was 8/- a day, 48/- a week for 48 hours' work. One of my early jobs, when I left school to succeed my brother as the whole staff of Messrs. Bennett and Bristow, legal managers and insurance agents in the Main Street (with what pride I took home my £1 a week!) was to pay those wages every fortnight to the men of a couple of mines. Later, as yields decreased, I was to make many an excursion along the 'street called Straight' (Main Street, Stawell, has as many angles as a book on geometry) with a lump of smelted gold in my pocket to see which bank would give the highest price. Pure alluvial gold was then worth just over £4 an ounce; this smelted stuff was valued at from £3/17/3 to £3/17/9. To-day the price would be twice as high. I can still see the bank tellers rubbing the bar or dump on a test-stone before making an offer.

'THE WOOD-GOD' (Web Gilbert carves a statue of the author.)

Low wages in those times! But there seemed to be no unemployment, and no real grinding poverty.

Social strata in the town there were of course, but, as is customary, they were mostly woman-created.

Men who had worked together in earlier days did not change as a rule when some struck riches and their mates didn't. One of the wealthiest stood in the porch of his new house one morning and saw his friend the old milkman pass, carrying two cans. Both men hailed from Scotland. Rain was falling heavily. 'Tak' the lids off, Jamie,' advised the sheltered one. 'No need, Wullie, they've had enough a'ready,' came the reply, and the two old friends nodded at each other appreciatively.

'Breathes there a man with soul so dead.'—Stawell has a halo about it which grows more definite to me with the years of separation. There are no impressions so vivid as those of boyhood. The bush about Stawell, the Black Range, Doctor's Creek, the Seventy Foot, the Silver Shilling, the Flying Doe, the Grampians—our Saturday and holiday tramps to such places gave me that taste for vagabondage which has since led me far. How we ate on those trips! Our careful mothers tried to over-estimate our appetites, but we came home each time with never a crust of the food we took away in such quantity.

Marcus Clarke had lived at Ledcourt, not far from Stawell, for a time. He was a legendary character in my day and later I was to come closer to that legend when I joined the Public Library, though I never saw the author of His Natural Life. One of his Stawell friends was N. Walter Swan, then editing the Pleasant Creek News and Stawell Chronicle. Swan wrote at least two novels—A Couple of Cups Ago and Luke Mivers' Harvest. The latter won a prize of £100 given by the Sydney Mail for the best tale by an Australian (they called it 'Colonial' then) author. His family at that time interested me more than did his writings: I was very young and his daughters were very charming. They still are.