August 1887
Thirteen-year-old Edith looks through the coach window across waves of human activity that sweep the paved and stony surfaces of the great city of London. Towers and spires float high in the haze. Great rivers of traffic flow around them, converging and merging in narrow gutters between the buildings. Dark-clad figures duck and weave between carts, carriages and cabs, filling every available space in the street. London is just as Richard Jefferies had described it.
‘The vans almost float on human beings,’ he’d written. ‘Now the streams slacken, and now they rush again, but never cease, dark waves are always rolling down the incline opposite, waves swell out from the side rivers, all London converges into this focus. There is an indistinguishable noise, it is not clatter, hum, or roar, it is not resolvable, made up of a thousand thousand footsteps, from a thousand hoofs, a thousand wheels, of haste, and shuffle, and quick movements, and ponderous loads, no attention can resolve it into a fixed sound.’
It is unimaginably different from their quiet country life in Guildford. Even George is lost for words, bewildered by all the sights and sounds of this new world that surrounds them. It feels like they are dislocated and drifting, grieving for a lost past and anxious for an uncertain future.
Just four months ago they buried Harriett in a quiet corner of the Mount Cemetery and now here they all are in London, their lives packed up and ready to follow Harry all the way to Australia. Harry said that Melbourne was booming and there was abundant demand for builders like their father. The climate would be warmer: safer for all of them. Harriett’s sudden death had shocked them into action.
They spent last night with Uncle Arthur and Alfred in Addlestone. Now they are all in a coach together, Henry and his family, his two brothers and theirs, to wave them all off.
Susan, Edith’s cousin, suddenly cries out. ‘Look, there’s Big Ben!’
‘Hush,’ chides Uncle Alfred. ‘You can see it again, but they won’t!’
The coach is silent until they reach the docks.
They bundle out into a scene of chaos and catastrophe.
Pyramids of luggage, baskets, boxes and cases are piled everywhere, along with beds and bedding, water cans, pannikins, hookpots and baths. It looks as if someone has emptied a shop’s warehouse onto the waterfront. The Harms’ luggage is piled up too, their life’s possessions carefully stacked into the allowable space of 40 cubic feet. They cannot afford to pay any excess. Most of the other passengers clearly can and the squeezing, crowding, pushing confusion to get on board is something fearful.
By the time Edith has helped her sisters and parents organise their goods in their third-class cabins on the lower deck, the ship is already underway. It is late afternoon on 11 August 1887. The four-masted steamer Ionic is towed out of ‘The Old Dart’ stern-first from Gravesend. Sailing backwards to an upside-down land on the other side of the world. Hervey and George are standing on the forepeak and waving their caps to a stocky chap in a yachtsman’s cap seated in the stern of a pinnace.
‘Goodbye, Captain!’ they shout cheekily.
The man responds with a cheerful wave of his cigar as the band on deck strikes up ‘God Save the Queen’.
‘That’s the Prince of Wales,’ says one of the crew as he passes by, nearly tripping over Edith. ‘Careful, miss, I didn’t see you there.’
The ship soon passes into open waters, bow-first under her own steam and, beneath the cliffs of Dover, they eat their last meal in English waters – Irish stew – before the seas rise and even George is confined to his bunk with seasickness.
MY SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER has returned from music camp tired and with a sore throat. It’s not just from too much singing. I feel her forehead, quiz her about bright lights, an aching neck or rashes. Meningitis strikes so quickly: the everyday symptoms of an innocuous cold degenerating within hours to fatal brain inflammation and blood poisoning. Every second counts, they say. Even with antibiotics, with early diagnosis, there is a 10 per cent fatality rate. Without antibiotics, Harriett did not stand a chance.
Lottie had already lost one child in infancy, born between Edith and George. With a 25 per cent infant mortality rate, the odds were stacked against all babies surviving in a family. That death would have been difficult enough, but to lose a child at sixteen years, on the cusp of adulthood, seems so unfair. I wonder if Harriett had been a poorly child, one with a ‘weak chest’ like Harry. Or perhaps she had been perfectly healthy, the one they had not had to worry about at all. I wonder who it was that gave them most concern, of the children still with them: Charlotte, Annie, Hervey, Edith or George? Who was it they moved across the globe, to a new world, to save?
More than one million immigrants headed for Victoria between 1860 and 1900. The rush of gold had waned, but the go-ahead colony remained alluring. More than half of these immigrants came from England. Immigration policies sought to limit the arrival of dark-skinned, Asian and non-English-speaking people into the colonies, while actively encouraging, even paying for the passage of, favoured groups like English migrants. For decades, Australian governments would advertise and solicit British ‘men for the land’ and British ‘women for the home’ to come to this land of opportunity with good wages and guaranteed employment.
After a brief stop at Plymouth to take on mail and passengers, the ship settled into her long sea journey. Despite being a steamer, the SS Ionic carried quite a bit of canvas on her four masts, which saved fuel and helped her make 300, sometimes 350, miles per day. Even this cracking pace was not quite on a par with the records set by the clippers, one of which flew past the Ionic even when she was doing 13 knots. Slow and steady wins the race, though, and the solid reliability of the steamers, whatever the wind, would ultimately drive the thoroughbred clippers off the high seas.
The ship carried both first- and third-class passengers and the Harms, in third class, had the whole lower deck to themselves. The boys amused themselves by helping haul on sails and assisting with the watches. It was not uncommon for male passengers at the time to relieve the boredom of the voyage by helping set sails or assisting in the store.
George got in a fight with an older boy, over a girl. He won the fight, a bloodied nose, a new friend and a girlfriend. Perhaps to keep the young boys occupied in more seemly activities, the first-class passengers organised sporting events – obstacle courses and jumping races. George claimed he won five shillings despite being the youngest.
What activities kept the young girls like Edith occupied is not recorded. Although the ratio of female to male passengers immigrating to Victoria in the nineteenth century was almost equivalent, far fewer journals and letters by women survive. By some accounts the women occupied themselves with tea parties, concerts, card games, drinking, singing or prayer. Other accounts saw them confined to the sick bay, caring for children and mothers or entirely concerned with food. Some seemed to have been restricted to their cabins, permitted out only at designated times, perhaps to protect them from the often brutal world of shipboard life.
‘It seems as if they tried to deprive us of every liberty,’ one passenger complained.
I can imagine few things more horrific than being confined to the lower decks on a long sea voyage, without access to the bracing airs and open vistas that are the sole solace of a journey that is, at best, tediously boring and, at worst, nauseatingly violent. But the experience varies dramatically by class, time and the type of ship as well as by gender. The voyage by steamer seems steadier and easier, by all accounts, than the earlier, overcrowded days of sail.
Jane Snodgrass made the journey from London to Melbourne by barque in 1886 with five small children in tow. Her account describes the discomfort of seasickness and injuries, socialising with fellow passengers, singing in concerts, special tidbits from the galley for the children. She is grateful to the sailors, often ‘one shilling a month’ men working their way to Australia, for helping her to keep the children occupied.
‘The passengers have been e
ntertained in the usual manner throughout by concerts, theatricals and other forms of amusement,’ the Hobart Mercury would report on the Ionic’s voyage.
I just hope Edith had a good supply of books.
The ship pulled in at Tenerife a week later for coal supplies. I am following in the Harms’ wake as closely as I can, reading the journal of John Fraser, who made the same journey the following year. His descriptions help me imagine what the Harms family would have seen.
‘The conical peaks sloping almost from the shore covered with fruit trees of all description and terminating in different peaks looked very pretty in the morning sun,’ wrote John in his diary. ‘The volcanic peak looks very barren towards the top but with the aid of a glass trees can be seen a long way up. The houses are nearly all white brick, low and flat roofed mostly one storey high but there are a few distinguished looking buildings and they all present a clean lively appearance from here but some of those that have been ashore say that the streets are very dirty.’
At Tenerife, the ship was accosted by Portuguese and Spanish traders selling fruit, tobacco, cigars, hats and other items. Henry bought a large basket of bananas for just two shillings, but they proved too strange for the rest of the family and he had to eat them himself. It would take some time in Australia before the children finally acquired a taste for the tropical fruit.
SS Ionic, which carried the Harms family to Australia in 1887
The weather improved considerably as their ship headed towards the equator, enough for just a thin sheet and a counterpane to keep them warm at night. The only notable events were the coincidence of crossing the line with the birth of a baby girl to one of the passengers.
John Fraser’s journals reveal the monotony of the trip, in which endless days follow each other in steady, relentless tedium.
Friday January 13th 1888
Nothing of interest to take note of today. Saw some flying fishes. Always busy reading or some such employment to pass time. In the evening there was a dance, but as I did not feel inclined to dance in this latitude I had a promenade round the deck instead.
Tuesday January 17th 1888
Nothing of interest today, indeed it is the same as other days in that respect as it is always the same thing over again with very few exceptions. In the evening there was a Bible Class which was pretty well attended. The sea has been a little choppy today but the weather is splendid.
I have lost Edith in this big, empty ship. She’s too young for the tea parties or drinking in the first-class saloon. I can’t see her running riot with her brothers. She could be at church or prayer meetings or singing, or sitting reading in silent companionship with her mother. I imagine Henry approaching, work-callused hands closed around a treasure he’s found – a dragonfly swept on oceanic winds far from home. I can see Edith wandering the decks, gazing at the rigging as the early morning light illuminates a tracery of a thousand baby spiders parachuted from the stratosphere. I wonder if Henry taught her to fish, as she will fish with her daughters – if she opened the translucent wings of the flying fish that landed on the decks and marvelled at their transition between fish and fowl.
I know that I am drawing too much from my own childhood here, at risk of losing touch with the historical record, drifting away into speculation. What else is there to do when the record is blank, the voices of history are silent and all I can hear are the ponderous murmuring of the menfolk and the riotous shrieks of boys at play?
The ship passed the Cape of Good Hope rounding the bottom of Africa three and a half weeks after leaving London, their last sight of land slipping below the horizon as they headed out across the southern stretches of the Indian Ocean. If the journey was not a fast one, it was at least blessed with fine weather. Once they left the coast of Africa they would see nothing but water, enlivened by the occasional whale or albatross, for another three weeks until making landfall at Australia’s southern port of Hobart at the head of the Derwent River.
Not every new arrival has greeted the Australian landscape with enthusiasm.
‘It is no use deluding oneself,’ declared Anna-Maria Bright in 1875, ‘by saying that it is not far to Australia – for it is – and tremendously far too.’
Most voyagers, no matter their destination, greet the sight of land after long weeks, or even months, at sea with relief. And for free settlers, Hobart was generally a pretty sight.
‘As we sail up this beautiful Derwent, every mile most distinctly marks the progress of civilisation,’ wrote Elizabeth Fenton in 1832. ‘We now are in sight of Hobarton, a small and irregularly built town, viewing it at this distance, but with an indefinable “English air”. Mount Wellington, yonder table mountain, rising abruptly over the mountain, is topped with snow . . . As we advance, pretty cottage residences are visible in what appeared impervious jungle. I wonder if these are “farm houses”. There are streaks of lovely yellow sand, fringing each diminutive bay or inlet of the waters among the hills; there are wide fields freshly ploughed, and ploughmen and sowers all busy at their labour with English smock-frocks.’
When the Harms family arrived in the Derwent on 23 September 1887, they had yet to reach their final destination. Passengers and their luggage bound for Melbourne were transferred to a coastal hooker which came alongside, most probably taking them to the three-masted barque Natal Queen, which was due to depart for Melbourne the next day. George had to be detached from his erstwhile girlfriend by irate parents who discovered them, closely connected, behind one of the aft ventilators. The final leg of their sea voyage, barely a day or two by steamer, would take much longer by sail, across the treacherous waters of Bass Strait before making their final landfall in Victoria.
‘At 4 o’clock Wilson’s Promontory was visible to all,’ announced Margaret Menzies with some relief on her arrival in 1838. ‘I got up earlier than usual to see the long wished for sight and was much gratified for although this part of the coast of New Holland is extremely bleak and barren it was delightful to see land of any kind after 3 months with nothing but the deep blue sea to feast our eyes on.’
My first visit to Wilsons Promontory, at the age of thirteen, was also by sea, sailing from the north-west tip of Tasmania with my parents. Bad weather had struck suddenly in Bass Strait. A front had arrived hard and fast, southern ocean swells forcing great tumbling roils of water into the shallow strait. The compaction drives the seas into the steep, chopping peaks that make Bass Strait one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world. Gale-force winds slammed us northwards towards the coast, threatening to drive us ashore before daylight.
We reefed back the sails, making six knots under the jib alone, lashed in the middle to reduce its pull. We threw seawarps made of tyres behind the boat, and released the anchor, spinning into the depths, in an effort to slow our progress. We spent the night, rolling violently, under and over the waves, portholes alternating green and white, checking for the cries of those on deck after every breaker.
Creeping into Wilsons Promontory at first light felt like salvation. The aptly named Refuge Cove, in the midst of one of Victoria’s oldest national parks, was silent apart from the flickering trill of birds drifting across the bay. Pristine vegetation spilled down the rocky boulders over pale beaches and glass-green waters. It was breathtakingly serene.
I sat alone on white sand as a family of superb fairy wrens in glorious plumage skipped around my feet, tails flicking and gentle songs trickling through the air as if overflowing from a cup. They hopped beneath my drawn-up knees, entirely unconcerned by my presence. I felt like the first person on earth, in an untouched paradise, in some kind of natural harmony. Or at least a place that people had not yet messed up. I caught a glimpse of something we call ‘wilderness’.
‘The country consists of hills and gullies, gentle rises or hollows covered with heath and other wild flowers, one of the most abundant being our beautiful red correa,’ Edith described Wilsons Promontory on a later camping trip. ‘There are rocky coasts, delightful
sandy bays, or quiet islands where many sea birds find resting places; and there are sedge-covered swamps or tea-tree fringed river flats.’
But such beauty is only apparent close to hand, not from a distance. Perhaps on her first sighting of the Victorian coast in 1887, such treasures would remain a part of the unknown promise of a new land. Perhaps, instead, Edith’s only expectations of Australia were formed by Charles Lamb’s caricature of Australian life, with pickpocketing kangaroos and convict stains. Or, like Ada Cambridge, did she arrive with a fearful expectation of ‘cannibal blacks and convict bushrangers . . . scentless flowers, the songless birds, the cherries with their stones outside’?
But this does not sound like the confident, assured woman Edith would grow into. I ask a friend, Grace Moore, who is a scholar of Victorian literature and its transposition into the Australian landscape.
‘Someone who read a lot of Dickens is likely to have expected a fairly lush, welcoming landscape,’ Grace suggests.
Like so many emigrants, Edith carried the imagined landscapes of her homeland’s literature with her, adapting and repurposing them to suit her new home. If Edith took her lead from Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and Henry Kingsley, she would have approached Australia’s shores anticipating fertile, verdant hills rich with the promise of great expectations.
It is always possible that I have this entire journey wrong. In a handwritten biographical note about Edith, Rica Erickson says that she ‘came to Western Australia with her parents in 1886, remaining in Perth for two years before sailing to Melbourne’. I can’t find any passenger lists to confirm or deny this, but George’s first-hand account of the voyage is detailed and adamantly different. Harry’s son Ivo also recalled it differently. The dates, from Harriett’s death, don’t add up. I have to choose which story to go with. The accepted family history seems the most convincing.
The Wasp and the Orchid Page 4
