Bettany's Book (16 page)

After the republicans were defeated, just as surely as the Spencean Philanthropists were, Horace’s property in Apulia had been confiscated for his crime, and yet he came to Rome and through cleverness and charm became a friend of Maecenas, the noble-hearted chief adviser of the young Emperor Augustus. And so ultimately and for a time he was appointed secretary to the Emperor himself!

Father was not secretary to an Emperor, nor had he come to Rome but, in the manner of empires, was sent to a remote island exile. However, he had had a Maecenas, and that Maecenas was Mr William Batchelor, soon to dominate the Van Diemen’s Land Legislative Council. Horace’s brief flirtation with republicanism was estimated by Maecenas to be an instance more of philosophic exuberance than of any genuine ill will against the institutions of society. So too was Father’s by kindly Mr Batchelor.

About the time my closest friend Charlie Batchelor and I reached manhood, news of great pastoral reaches available on the mainland, in New South Wales, arrived in Van Diemen’s Land and left us excited. My younger brother, Simon, was similarly stimulated. Our fathers would,
after Sunday dinner at Hydebrae, take the maps out. Of all the immensity of New South Wales, only an area as big as Ireland was detailed on these maps. A stretch of coastline somewhat less than three hundred miles, and country inland, about one hundred and fifty miles, as far as the Lachlan river. The Lachlan was the Styx of the mainland, so it seemed – all was oblivion and nullity beyond. Within the line lay the area where government operated, enforced affairs, provided land title, and named things. The limits, beyond which government’s writ ceased to run, and things were not named, were called ‘the Limits of Location’. The Governor of New South Wales hoped that settlers would constrain themselves to the area within the Limits, and even implied that those who went beyond lacked legitimacy. But even as boys, through reading Hobart newspapers, we knew that many mainland settlers from reputable families had gone beyond the line – that it was not considered dishonourable to do so, and that all of us would try it if we could, expanding the repute of our fathers’ names to an extent not possible in the pleasant but narrow valleys of Van Diemen’s Land.

Charlie travelled from Hobart to Sydney with me on the sloop
Emu
in a late Australian summer whose air of hope and novelty I shall never forget. Charlie was twenty-four, and a compact, dark-complexioned young man – he attributed his looks to a Cornish grandmother, and owed his hard-headedness and wariness to the Batchelor way of doing things. I was twenty-three, tall and somewhat sandy in appearance, with blue eyes my mother called ‘Danish’. Though the son of an elevated convict, I uneasily considered myself Charlie’s equal, and there was never anything in Charlie’s demeanour to say the contrary.

Visitors from England arriving in that port of Sydney declare its harbour vast and admirable, but for my money it did not match in splendour the long, green approaches to Hobart. Similarly much had been made of the deportment of the ‘canaries’, the convict labourers in yellow cloth, and of the profligacy and high colour of former London prostitutes, drunk at ten in the morning, lounging at the gates of their little cottages and crying out in eminently resistible lewdness to the passers-by. The thing was that Charlie and I were used to felons – Hobart was full of them. There was no novelty for us here, nor had we a reason to visit any of the grandees, the merchants or wool-brokers, of Macquarie Street or Point Piper. We would possess the city ultimately, in our way, we did not doubt. But for now we wished to possess the interior.

I knew that Charlie travelled with some genuine capital in his money
belt, as well as having opened an account in the Bank of Australia, the bank favoured by free landholders. I knew too that he had instructions from his father to go to country within the western limits, country on whose qualities Mr Batchelor had been corresponding with some settler of his acquaintance from New South Wales. Charlie was not only to buy a farm of his own on the family’s behalf, but was also to purchase some well-balanced flocks of Spanish Merino sheep, by all accounts far preferred in New South Wales than the Romneys and Leicesters of Van Diemen’s Land, and put them out to graze to homesteaders within the Limits of Location, according to the arrangement named ‘thirds’, an arrangement said to be as ancient as the Old Testament. By it, a settler would take an investor’s flocks, run them at pasture, pay the annual expenses of convicts to shepherd them and watch them into hurdles by night, bear the expense of shearing and carting the wool to market, and all other incidental expenses from year to year. In return for which he would receive one-third of the wool, and one-third of the annual increase, the lambs to be divided at weaning time each year, that is, about the same time of year as Charlie and I first arrived in Sydney.

My task, however, as suited a man whose resources were far more limited, was to establish in partnership with Charlie some place open for settlement beyond the Limits of Location – that is, to find pastoral land, available free, which had never been grazed since the hand of God set time thundering. The land beyond! Charlie and I would stock it with sheep and cattle, some of them mine, and we would share the costs of equipment for establishing ourselves there, and again I would keep stock books and run his livestock on the normal system of thirds.

So, first, I must search for remoter country. I had, as I have already indicated, limited resources. I possessed a letter of credit for £400 with the Savings Bank of New South Wales, one of whose directors had been transported with my father years past, the Savings Bank being considered the preserve of mad democrats and pardoned convicts and much inferior to the Bank of Australia. This £400 was made up of my wages from my father’s farm, Tiverton, and a patrimony of £250 my father had generously settled on me when I turned twenty-three. My first chief item of expenditure was the purchase for £12 of one of those hardy New South Wales stock horses named walers, after New South Wales. These horses were Arab in part, Welsh and Indian in others. The horse in question was a three-year-old, and I was happy to find it had already been named Hobbes, since Father was an admirer of Hobbes’s
Leviathan
. ‘Hobbes is
one of the makers of the world we have,’ he told me levelly when I was eighteen. ‘He devised the social contract, which benefits us here better than it did back there. Thus he is a prophet of the new world.’

For my journey I had also acquired a saddle, a bridle, a pair of saddlebags to contain razor, shirts, stockings, spare moleskins, a sealskin cape, a blanket and a kangaroo skin, and the second pistol I had bought to go with the one my father had given me. And, perhaps above all, my copy of Horace, a shield in the barbarous but wonderful outer regions. With the benefit of this equipment, I was a young man precisely where he wanted to be, going precisely where I wanted to go, fitted out with all the wonders of my society, with the affections of distant parents, and the backing of the Batchelors.

Since Charlie had some more business than me in Sydney, he agreed to meet me in Goulburn in a month’s time, and I started off, making first for the inland county of Argyle, named in sentiment and perhaps for reassurance after the county in Scotland. My track led me through the little produce market and garrison town of Liverpool, where I had never seen soldiers look paler under their sunburn, nor more stricken with boredom. Past it I was in billowing green-brown country, which resembled very much a massive hide stretched out and spiked to the earth’s inner frame with the sometimes white, sometimes fire-blackened shafts of eucalypt trees running limitless to the west. This earth had a very different feel from the dense woods of Van Diemen’s Land: more open, that is, more dominated by the sun, and more perilous.

I had sewn £80 into my saddle lining, in case of the bushrangers and outlaws of whom the
London Illustrated News
wrote with such relish. Anyone was welcome, if they asked, to the thirteen shillings and eight pence I carried in my fob. I felt in no way constrained or frightened however. I felt in that most wonderful of Australian eras that I had the run of the unsullied earth.

So Hobbes and I proceeded past Campbelltown and the pastures of Camden, very fine country for animals but grabbed early, even before my father committed his Horatian crime! This was land thick with convict shepherds. Yorkshiremen, children of Erin, Scots from the Highlands, the latter, as my father said, nearly more understandable when they spoke Erse than when they spoke English. And they, in tune with my father’s hopeful attitude towards transportation, seemed to be living a life better than they expected. Deliverance through sentence: they had anticipated Hades and been given Arcady. They would wave a eucalyptus
staff at the traveller and cry ‘Gidday to you Surrh’.

Eighty miles on my way, the little town of Berrima sat, like Ross, on its alluvial ground. But beyond Bong Bong, the country became very lonely, a phenomenon I nonetheless welcomed. Poor soil here, old and unredeemed. Scrawny bush covered it. I got to the summit of the Towrang Hill and looked down into much lovelier ground, with two small rivers running through it, Mulwaree Ponds and the Wollondilli. They met a little below the township of Goulburn. The town itself, spread outwards from Mulwaree Ponds like an encampment, had a population of nearly 3500 souls, one of whom – a Mr Finlay – I had an introduction to.

I arrived at dusk – by way of a red clay driveway – at an excellent brick and sandstone house, a relative rarity in this part of New South Wales. Through trees from his front verandah, the roof of Finlay’s brewery could be seen, designed to supply the thirsty county of Argyle.

Finlay was a man of severe features, and his wife in her dark beauty reminded me of handsome Mrs Batchelor. That evening at dinner, I became something of a favourite of his perhaps fourteen-year-old, lustrous daughter, Phoebe. She was of a different order of beauty to that of her mother – it was as if they had decided between them to cover the allotted glories available to womankind, and Phoebe, fair and with green eyes, was in other respects her splendid mater’s child. When after dinner, however, she attempted to follow her father and myself onto the verandah, Mr Finlay had only to murmur, ‘Please!’ to make her disappear, flitting with her golden hair indoors. ‘
They
don’t understand,’ he told me, and by
they
, he seemed to mean colonial children. There was a rigidity in his neat frame, his exact shoulders. I read it as representing success. But I was nonetheless pleased to hear him say at the end of our pipe-smoking, ‘You must speak to me about investing in livestock with you if you find suitable ground, John.’ Thirds, again. The glorious, ancient and now antipodean arrangement which made the world possible for the son of a Spencean Philanthropist.

Phoebe, on leaving the verandah in semi-obedience, had worn a curious little unabashed smile, whose glow remained after the lamps indoors were turned down.
O matre pulchra filia pulchrior
, I reflected of the Finlay women, borrowing the line from Horace. ‘O beautiful mother to a yet more beautiful daughter.’

I was delighted visiting Hobbes over the next day to see how quickly my pony took on condition grazing in Mr Finlay’s paddock. When on
the second morning I saddled him, I was watched from the yard fence by lovely Mrs Finlay, who carried a parasol and was shaded as well by a huge hat, and by Phoebe, echoes of each other, one of the olive cast, one of the light peach. Mrs Finlay said, ‘I can see that you are excited at the prospects of the wilderness.’

I admitted that I was.

She said that I must consider myself free to stay with them again whenever I tired of isolation and was passing Goulburn. She said it with some wistfulness, not like a woman who could afford to return to Europe whenever she chose.

The beautiful child, Phoebe, proclaimed, ‘I wish I were going to the country out there. Goulburn is marked by nothing but torpor.’

‘No it’s not,’ said her mother. ‘It’s just your new word.’ She murmured to me, ‘The young may sometimes fall in love with a word.’

‘I would not want to marry,’ Phoebe insisted, ‘a man who was content with Goulburn’s torpor.’

Her mother extended a finger, and spoke with a melancholy fondness. ‘Your father will send you to Europe to be tidied up if you fling around abstract nouns as if they were stones.’ But then the three of us began laughing like guilty schoolchildren, as if in Mr Finlay’s shadow. ‘I would be delighted one day to have a daughter like you,’ I told Phoebe, but she glowered at me, as if I had cast her in an inferior role in a play.

South of the Finlay estate I entered the area of pasture and native coachwood named the Limestone Plains, where there were few public houses or boarding houses. At the core of each day, about noon, I unsaddled Hobbes and ate a slab of damper with mutton supplied by my host of the previous night and read newspapers from my saddlebag. In the dusk I would look for a glimmer of light or a thread of smoke. I was close to the invisible line, the southern edge of the Limits of Location. Here rich men lived in slab huts, and the owner would call a convict servant to unsaddle a traveller’s horse, and turn it out into a grassy paddock. Lying on my kangaroo skin rug, surrounded by other travellers or convict servants and stockmen similarly encouched, I slept deeply by the doused fire. This was hospitality, this was comfort, on the edge of the defined, the outer regions of the limits. Better comfort, I was certain, and a surer hand than you could have anywhere else on earth.

When I left one settler, he would give me instructions on how to reach the next, and I divided the bush of Australia, sure of my time, sure of success, into sweet little daily lumps of twenty or thirty miles in extent,
about the range of my pony
per diem
, and about the extent of sheep and cattle runs in that part. I soon knew, though I was not precisely sure when it happened, that I had passed beyond the limits.

I stayed about then with a gentleman at a place named Baldalgo, in a long, crude slab hut of a kind I would be happy to occupy. He was an Oxford man, and had a dresser full of classic texts. His father was Arch-deacon of Wells. He lived joyously in conditions hardly better than those in which an English herder lived, with smoky sheep’s-fat lamps throwing shadows over his dirt floor, and his only medical remedies being bottles of spirits and a box of antacid powder. For his casual good humour alone, his contentment, good fortune and cultivation, I would willingly have traded places with him.