Australians, Volume 2

by Thomas Keneally

  No similar legal severity existed in the case of lesbianism. While Wilson was being charged and condemned, a young woman from Adelaide named Anne Jones, who had worn male attire for five years, claiming that she had begun the practice ‘as a frolic’, was not further investigated. When a man named Jorgenson died in Elmore in Melbourne in 1893 he was found to be a woman. The newspapers claimed he had done service in the Victorian Mounted Rifles and had tried for some time to find a wife, despite facial damage caused by a kick from a horse. The public reaction to the Jorgenson story—her real name being Joanna—and her attempts to marry a young woman seemed to create public amusement rather than the sort of moral outrage which Chief Justice Stawell expressed against Wilson. Lesbianism had never had the press, judicial attention, the condemnations from pulpits and public forums, that male homosexuality attracted.

  Another much later case of a woman masquerading as a man with the apparent purpose of same-sex marriage was that of Harcourt Payne, who in 1939 collapsed in the street in Lidcombe in New South Wales. He was taken to the Lidcombe Old Men’s State Hospital. When he was bathed he was found to be a woman. Immediately he was dressed as a woman and transferred by ambulance to a nearby psychiatric hospital. His real name was Annie Payne and he had been twice married and widowed. Harriet, his first wife, had known of his gender when they were servants in Newcastle, working in houses across the road from each other. Harcourt was married to Harriet for seventeen years, and his second wife, Louisa, for ten.

  The universal enforcement of the various colonial enactments adopted from Britain controlling homosexuality was generally ineffective. Between 1871 and 1900 only 356 men were arrested in Victoria for ‘unnatural offences’, a class of crime which included bestiality as well as homosexuality. Homosexual men frequenting ‘beats’—such as parks and beaches—were generally charged with loitering or offensive behaviour and appeared before magistrates. Despite the statute against it, paedophilia did not seem to preoccupy the law as did sodomy. For example, when James McFadden, a station manager at Beechworth, attempted to have sex with his thirteen-year-old male cook while out droving, he was charged with assault with intent to commit sodomy, not with sexually assaulting a minor.

  One reason law enforcement often subjected homosexual men to warnings and misdemeanour charges was in part an attempt to draw public attention away from the existence of gays. The question of whether there was a self-aware homosexual community in the big cities and towns, and how early in Australian history, is debated. In the 1860s and 1870s there still existed in Australia an imbalance between the sexes, and many itinerant former convicts were accustomed to homosexual sex from their experience of imprisonment. The extent to which they were ‘committedly gay’, as the modern phrase has it, is a mere surmise.

  It would not be until the mid-1870s that the price of wool declined. The graziers of the 1870s pushed out into saltbush and mulga country, trying to increase production. The mulga was a desert form of acacia, a robust tree good for campfires and making fences, but its very name became synonymous with infertile and remote places. Settlement pressed unviably forward in New South Wales and Queensland in the 1860s and into the desert regions of South Australia in the 1870s.

  While the fleece was golden, the squatters were flush and enthused enough to employ architects and craftsmen the gold rushes had brought to Australia to build country houses which mimicked those found in the English countryside. Horatio Wills’ Lexington was one. In remoter Queensland, the slab timber house made of bark and branches, all pegged down with lengths of timber, was still the characteristic homestead, but such rough materials would no longer suffice for the grandees of Victoria and New South Wales. The old shacks of the early years had gone hand in hand with casual sexual associations—the companionship of the convict or ex-convict servant woman or the Aborigine had been good enough then. There had been exceptions. William Adams Brodribb had brought his wife Eliza Matilda Kennedy to Coolringdon station near Cooma in 1844, and nine years later John Kennedy had married Brodribb’s sister Lavinia. These wives bore, at least for a considerable part of their marriage, elementary food served on a slab of bark amidst the din of Aboriginal marital arguments from beyond the door. Add to their woes the severe seasons, the mutton-fat smokiness, the uninhibited clouds of insects, the earthen floors, the bushfires, the dust storms, the loneliness, the lack of entertainment and the dearth of medical attention for themselves and their young children. These old days are evoked by the song ‘The Squatter’s Warning’:

  Dwell not with me,

  Dwell not with me . . .

  Our dwelling place a hut would be,

  Half shaded by a blackbutt-tree.

  Aah, then you’d mourn the soft woodbine,

  Which round your lattice now doth twine . . .

  But by the 1860s these old features of the squatter’s life were giving way to elevated architecture and comforts. He could marry now at an age he chose and did not need to endure a long celibacy. The Married Women’s Property Act of Victoria in 1870 probably found its way through the conservative Legislative Council because it enabled squatters’ wives to acquire their share of their parents’ land and add it to the holdings of their husbands.

  Sir Samuel Wilson, a Northern Irishman, married Jeannie Campbell, daughter of another wealthy squatter. During the gold rushes, he had brought supplies by bullock team to the gold diggings, and the miners knew him as ‘Bullocky Sam’. His later photographic portrait in the suit, buttoned britches, long hose and buckled shoes of his knighthood, his sword clasped by the blade diagonally in his gloved hand, has nothing of the bullocky about it. Wilson came to acquire many squatting properties in the Wimmera, to which he added many more in other parts of Victoria and at Yanco in New South Wales. He had the characteristic land obsession of the Irish and would acquire eighteen stations by the end of his life. In 1874 he would endow the University of Melbourne with £30 000 to build Wilson Hall.

  Charles Ebden of Carlsruhe in Victoria earned the nickname ‘The Count’ because he refused to talk to any except the most important visitors to his property and consigned the rest to a slab cottage or the workers’ quarters. Robert Barton, an overseer on Gurley Station near Moree, New South Wales, found that the owner’s wife and her sister were determined to exclude him from the dining room by not setting a place for him at the table. Barton determinedly went on fetching his own cutlery from the kitchen, but ultimately he had to eat in the kitchen along with the ‘colonial experiencers’, the young men sent by their families in Britain to gain experience of Australian stations.

  Rachel Henning on Exmoor Station in Queensland required men to dress in suits when sitting in the parlour. White employees ate in the kitchen, black stockmen and servants on a bench outside the back door. She did not mix with any of the local farmers for fear they would borrow tools, horses or oxen, and become unduly sociable.

  Barwon Park near Winchelsea, south-west of Melbourne, built in 1869–71 by the pastoralist Thomas Austin, who would introduce the hardy rabbits which would infest Australia for the rest of its history, was an extraordinary pile. Austin’s wife, Elizabeth, had been mortified by her sister-in-law’s grand house and had been ashamed to receive the Duke of Edinburgh in her own homestead, which she considered of inferior quality, when he was visiting Victoria in 1867. The result of her ambition was a massive bluestone house with forty large rooms, an entrance hall and a staircase. Her husband died, but Elizabeth lived in the palazzo for forty years and finally endowed the Austin Hospital in Melbourne. The central staircase of Barwon Park is worthy of an ascent by any duke, and its columns, mouldings and balustrades are of a quality fit for the grandest British house.

  Werribee Park was a similar house near Melbourne, built by the squatter Thomas Chermside, son of an East Lothian farmer. While still showing the rough edges of his earlier squatting life, Chermside, a bachelor, built a mansion containing sixty rooms in two wings. T
he old bark homestead was permitted to stand on in the grounds as a reminder of humbler origins.

  In 1874 Sir William Clarke, in his sixties, a Van Diemen’s Land settler who then moved his operations into the Port Phillip region, built a mansion named Rupertswood near Sunbury. He had a private railway platform built to receive house guests arriving by rail.

  At Birksgate near Adelaide, Thomas Elder, a Scot who would create one of the biggest wool-buying and-selling companies in the world, and who bred camels for transportation in the hinterland of Australia and shipped in Afghans to manage them, acquired the mansion of Birksgate near Glen Osmond and installed his own gas plant to light up the house and conservatory. On the grounds he stocked a zoo and built a tower from which he could signal to yachts racing on Gulf St Vincent. He was also a massive endower of the University of Adelaide.

  Bonthorambo in northern Victoria was a particularly fine house with a tower, owned by Joseph Docker, a minister of religion and former rector of St Matthew’s in Windsor, New South Wales. He had crossed the Murray in 1838 looking for land, and had shown some sympathies for the native inhabitants. He occupied the splendid house built in 1864 for only one year before his death.

  OTHER PASTORAL ORPHANS

  What Elder and Docker were, Alfred d’Orsay Tennyson Dickens wanted to become. While at remote Corona, Alfred Dickens was host to an expedition which had been surveying the exact boundary between New South Wales and South Australia. They were astonished to find in this harsh, stony country the son of the famed novelist. But now he had opportunities he did not have before his father’s death. He had received £7000 as his share of his father’s inheritance. Dickens had expressed the hope that each boy would use the money from his will to become ‘proprietors’. By 1872 Alfred had taken up a property further east, Wangagong near Forbes in New South Wales.

  But it was a year of drought, and in such a time money evaporated. Nearby, in the same hard season, Anthony Trollope was visiting his son on his property, Mortray, and declared that, ‘I never knew a man work with more persistent honesty.’ Trollope himself had invested some thousands into Frederic’s property, but just before his visit to Australia, the New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Company took the property over and employed Frederic as the manager.

  Alfred, having lost a great part of his inheritance in western New South Wales, went to Melbourne to take up a job with the London and Australian Agency Corporation Limited in their wool warehouses and office in Collins Street. He became engaged to Augusta Jessie Devlin, the daughter of a master mariner. They were married at St John’s Church of England in Toorak on 13 March 1873. Alfred gave his occupation as ‘gentleman’. He told his relatives that his wife was ‘beautiful and accomplished’.

  Misfortune struck again, but he could barely be blamed for his next disaster—the company he worked for went bankrupt itself. Drought had snuffed them out too. It was as if the country kept saying, Drought!, but people did not quite believe it. In 1874, as part of his new work—acting secretary to the Deniliquin and Moama Railway in New South Wales, though still domiciled in Melbourne—Alfred came to the Western District of Victoria, and Hamilton in particular. There he made such an impression as a good fellow that they selected him as a member of their cricket team to play a neighbouring town. By January 1874 he was in partnership with Robert Bree as a stock and station agent of Hamilton, within energising sight of mountains named the Grampians. Clearly intending to settle permanently in Hamilton, Alfred bought a nine-room house and furnished it in a way which must have impressed his neighbours. He and Jessie possessed oil paintings, Wedgwood statuettes and a piano. There were stables, an underground watertank and a pony carriage in which his wife went driving. Jessie gave birth to two girls, members of the group immigrants called ‘natives’.

  Was this the Australian success his father had imagined? Had Alfred become safe from the bullyings of Australian seasons? He pursued the Dickens’ passion for cricket as a member of the Hamilton Cricket XI and secretary of the Cricket Association. He also joined the racing club and the whist club. He attended balls and civic events. Then, in 1878, Jessie was thrown from her pony cart and killed. There was grief for Alfred. A young townswoman named Polly McLellan moved in to the Dickens’ house as housekeeper, an event which would have been considered by some as faintly improper.

  The year after his wife’s death, the partnership with Bree was dissolved and Alfred d’Orsay Tennyson Dickens returned to Melbourne to work in his own right as a stock and station commissioner and a general financial agent. With Yanda sold to pay debts, Plorn also came to Melbourne and they ran the company as partners, though, for reasons unknown, the company bore Plorn’s name alone—E.B.L. Dickens and Company.

  THE DUKE, LOYALISM AND PISTOLS

  Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, the second son of Queen Victoria, was just twenty-four when he visited Australia in the ship he commanded, HMS Galatea. After bypassing a disgruntled Western Australia, he reached Adelaide at the end of October 1867. To his own mind he was just a young man looking for a good time, but in the mind of the parliaments and populists he was an embodiment of that Crown which stood at the apex of all Australian law, civic piety and even land use. In Melbourne his visit was attended by a riot, or more accurately an Orange Protestant versus Irish Republican brawl, but the prince was not distracted by sectarian fury amongst the lower classes. It was possible for gentlemen to be entertained by a better class of prostitute in the private boxes in theatres, and Prince Alfred was accommodated by one nicknamed Psyche, a famous woman of the demimonde. It was also rumoured that Police Commissioner Standish introduced him to an establishment in Lonsdale Street.

  In Sydney a royal charity picnic, open to the public, was to be held at Clontarf—a delightful beach Sydneysiders could reach by ferry—on 12 March 1868. The name may have seemed symbolic to some of the more passionate Irish since Clontarf was the site of the medieval Irish king Brian Boru’s final battle against the Norsemen and the place of his death. Amongst the public who crossed to Sydney’s Clontarf by ferry that day was a young mentally deranged man named Henry O’Farrell, a self-appointed Fenian—not a member of the official organisation. He carried two weapons, a Smith & Wesson and a Colt, concealed in his clothing. Most of the rest of the Irish community, remembering the famine, remained behind in Sydney, murmuring about the event’s perceived silliness and mocking the lickspittles who had gone.

  At Clontarf, O’Farrell manoeuvred himself behind the prince and the Governor of New South Wales, Lord Belmore, a liberal-minded Irish landowner who like many of his class took colonial jobs as a way of partly financing their encumbered estates back in Ireland. The bullet O’Farrell fired entered to the right of the prince’s spine and lodged in the flesh on the right side of the chest. O’Farrell was wrestled to the ground, yelling, ‘I’m a Fenian—God save Ireland!’

  The prince was taken back to Sydney, the bullet was removed from the chest—according to some without his taking anaesthetic—and the wound pronounced non-fatal. Young and robust Prince Alfred would recover, later giving his seal of approval to the founding of two hospitals, one in Sydney, one in Melbourne, in his name.

  When questioned by the police O’Farrell told them that he had been authorised by the international organisation of Fenians to kill Prince Alfred, a statement which created hysteria amongst some loyalists—though not with Lord Belmore, who could see O’Farrell was mad. O’Farrell withdrew the statement on the eve of his execution at Darlinghurst gaol, but many throughout Australia believed his original statement and chose further to believe that he represented in his actions the desires of all Irish Catholics.

  Sir Henry Parkes, Attorney-General of New South Wales, was a competent stoker of the frenzy. He even let a convicted confidence man out of gaol to go into the bush, to such places as Grenfell, and track down Fenian cells amongst the Irish. It was believed too that Fenian cells were working on the state railways. Lord B
elmore warned Parkes of the dangers of provoking sectarianism, but Parkes had found hysteria too useful a political asset. Even in the police force Irishmen were under suspicion and any item of reported pub gossip was likely to attract an energetic investigation. Throughout all the colonies, many Irish Catholics were immediately sacked, creating generations of bitterness. A Bellevue Hill milkman who had said the prince deserved punishment for being a philanderer was investigated by all the forces of the law.

  Prince Alfred would marry a daughter of the Russian Tsar and live until 1900. On both sides of the sectarian divide, the bitterness would last longer.

  SECTARIAN VITUPERATION

  After Catholic bishops from all over the world voted in the Vatican Council of 1869–70 to acknowledge the sovereignty and infallibility of the Pope in matters of faith and morals, the Irish Catholics of Australia accepted the dogma without much fuss. In America, there had been many bishops who believed that the final arbiter of faith and morals was a council of the church’s bishops meeting under the aegis of the Pope, rather than the authority of the Pope alone, but this position was outvoted in the Council. The future Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, scholarly, austere Patrick Francis Moran, had attended the Vatican Council as a proxy for an Irish bishop, and he had no doubt about papal infallibility and, after his appointment to Sydney in 1884, vigorously espoused it. Like most Irish church leaders of his generation, he had been educated not in France, like the priests who took part in the Irish uprising of 1798, but in the Irish College of Rome, where the centrality of the papacy was everywhere accepted and visible.