Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  MY CHILDHOOD AND JOURNEY TO NEW SOUTH WALES

  My father used tell my brother Simon and myself in the vaguest terms that when he was young he was very like the poet Horace. He had been raised on Quintus Horatius Flaccus (BC 65–8), Odes, Books I–IV, and Horace was the classic poet he loved above all, and attempted to teach the colonial-hearty Batchelor boys and ourselves at Hydebrae, west of Ross, Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania.

  Father’s constant references to Horace may have been in part his way of letting us know that in his youth, like the poet, he had committed some crime, or let me use my kindly mother’s phrase, some ‘mistake of politics’. It was clear to me even then that his crime had been more a matter of enthusiasm, since, unlike real convicts and felons, he was respected by the better people in Hobart and Ross. They accepted that whatever he had done – something ill-advised and republican – had been a matter of a good heart, exuberance and earnest intent. It was a sin from which everyone, including himself, had long recovered. Mother, Simon, myself, were after all its beneficiaries. It had brought us from a small house in Manchester, in a sunless street with a cloaca in the midst of it and typhus on every corner, to temperate and robust Hobart. O, happy crime – peccatum felix. Or so it seemed to us.

  The small disadvantage of our situation was that everyone knew father was a former ticket-of-leave man as all in Rome knew that Horace’s father was a freed slave. But it was taken for granted that only the meanest of people mentioned it aloud. So few of these were there, and so well was father greeted by the progressive settlers such as the Batchelors, that he was as empty of any grievance as were Horace’s sunnier verses.

  Vino et lucernis Medus acinates

  immane quantum discrepat: impium

  lenite clamorem, sodales,

  Et cubito remanete presso.

  By wine and the light of lamps

  Drawn Median daggers are inappropriate,

  So soften the row, mates,

  And keep your elbows tucked in place.

  As I got older, I gathered a little more intelligence of father’s mistake, and of my English antecedents.

  ‘According to Suetonius,’ father told the Batchelor boys and my brother Simon and me one day, ‘Horace’s father was a salsamentarius, a seller of salted fish. Similarly, my father was a fishmonger from Widnes. And like Horace’s father he possessed a noble mind.’

  In the trap on the way home from the little Anglican church in Ross one Sunday, Mother said dreamily – she often gave her most important news in a state of false torpor – ‘I like Anglicans greatly. They’re less likely to lose their common sense than Wesleyans. Your father’s father was a Wesleyan, and interpreted the words of the Gospels in a fanatic way.’

  I wondered what this fanatic way might have been, for I intended to avoid it. In a book from the case of books Mother had packed for us to bring to join Father, I found an old history of Greece, and inside its cover, in an arduously achieved hand, misted by the increasing greyness of the paper, the words, ‘The Society of Spencean Philanthropists.’ Then, in the back of another of Father’s old books I found a verse:

  Hark how the Trumpet’s Sound

  Proclaims the Land around

  The Jubilee;

  Tells all the poor oppressed

  No more shall they be cess’d

  Nor landlords more molest,

  Their Property.

  I waited several weeks before I asked my mother, one howling Tasmanian winter’s evening by the fire, ‘Ma, could you tell me what is the Society of Spencean Philanthropists?’

  My mother looked up from needlework with a severe fright in her eyes.

  ‘Where did you hear of them, Jonathan?’

  ‘Someone mentioned them. It might have been that parson, the Reverend Munroe, at Mr Batchelor’s.’

  ‘What did he say about them?’

  ‘He said something about having known them … Not here! In England.’

  ‘How would he know of them? Was he trying to blacken your father?’

  I had got deep in, since it was her acutest fear that someone would discuss my father’s crime. ‘No, no. Was Father one of these Philanthropists?’

  ‘Your grandfather was one of that cracked fraternity,’ she said in a lowered voice, without lifting her eyes, as if the shame were hers. ‘He influenced your father, but he no longer does.’

  ‘Well, he’s dead, isn’t he, Ma?’ I remarked.

  ‘Yes, he is dead, nor does he have any influence.’

  At that age I was simple-minded enough to think that the two things – dead, no influence – were the same.

  After I had reassured my mother, she in turn told me that Spence had been a Londoner who put fanatic weight on those parts of the Gospels which had to do with property. The rights of the poor, the verses in which Christ called on his followers to sell all they had to give to the poor, the difficulties for rich men entering heaven, and so on – all that Spence and his Spenceans interpreted by the letter, and so expressed contempt for the rights of property. ‘Wesleyan, of course,’ said my mother. ‘That is why your father and I have now embraced the Anglican faith, since you never hear such folly from them.’

  I would not have said Father had ‘embraced’ the Anglican faith. The verb was too strong for his good-humoured attendance at Sunday service. He had begun attending before we all arrived, while he was still an assigned convict tutor to the Batchelors, permitted by some arrangement of Mr Batchelor with the Convict Department to wear a suit.

  As part of their belief that Christ wanted property equally distributed, Mother explained, the Philanthropists wanted the monarchy removed, and the king of England banished or punished in some French Jacobin manner. I found this all hard to believe – not that men would propose it, but that this was the nature of my genial father’s dereliction.

  For by now we were possessors of a pleasant 2000 acre farm, Tiverton, adjoining the Batchelor estate, and Father, having achieved not only his ticket-of-leave but being in receipt too of a conditional pardon, had hired a young free settler to run the farm while he himself conducted four days a week a respected law practice in Hobart. The habit of ownership had grown on him. But my grandfather, the fishmonger, had been one of the chief distributors of Spence’s tracts and seditious newspapers – the Giant Killer, or Anti-Landlord, for instance – in the North. He was typical, said Mother, of the self-educated tradesmen, the law clerks, the Wesleyan preachers of a particular stripe who belonged to that society, and into which my father had been born.

  Naturally, while Mother was willing to talk, I pressed the issue and found that Father had tried to swear into the Philanthropists the son of a prominent Tib Street cloth merchant. It was not to be wondered at that after the Philanthropists had already rioted in London, at Spa Fields – about which until that moment I had heard nothing – the authorities should treat my gentle father as if he was of the same colour as the extremists. But he was not – he would never have been a credible comrade of the cockade-wearing men who tried to take the Tower and the Bank of London, their malice, incompetence and drunkenness all rivalling each other.

  The less than fair reality was that Father had been one of the few Philanthropists transported. That had been due to the excessive fervour in sentencing by the Manchester magistrates. ‘Your father was always,’ said Mother, ‘too easily influenced by the sight of misery amongst people whose names he did not even know.’ That was why his transportation was such a blessing, for whatever could be said of Van Diemen’s Land, no one starved, and indeed the lower classes, particularly as represented in the felon and ticket-of-leave ranks, distracted anyone from too much compassion by their frankness, their vulgarity, their poor morals and their dram-drinking.

  Now I really saw why Horace was my father’s favourite. Take this example: Horace’s former-slave father, involved in the fish trade, had sent his son to Athens to study philosophy. Similarly, my grandfather the fishmonger had indentured his son as a law clerk to an ‘eminent
solicitor’ (my mother’s term of course). While Horace studied, the assassins of the Emperor Julius Caesar, Brutus and Cassius, arrived in Athens and turned the heads of all the students. While my father studied, he was influenced by his own father towards the Spencean Philanthropists. Having been appointed a military tribune by Brutus, Horace saw him as his fellow philosopher, and volunteered to serve in his republican forces on the battlefield of Philippi, just as Father had agreed to recruit and perhaps fight for the radical Philanthropists. Horace found himself no soldier, just as Father had found himself no revolutionary.

  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.