CHAPTER XX

AUSTRALIANS IN LITERATURE

AS I lived four or five years in Australia, and have written various books upon Australian poets, and as both my wife and my son are Victorians by birth, it is natural for me to devote a chapter to Australians in literature whom I have known, counting both people from the Old Country who became Australians by residence, and those who were born or educated in Australia, though their writing career has been in England.

I never met either Gordon or Kendall—Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Clarence Kendall, the twin stars of Australian poetry, naturally come first to one’s mind in writing of Australian literature, because poetry in Australia, as usual, preceded prose as an art.

Gordon, whose nephew, Henry Ratti, living in London, had just placed himself in communication with me in a couple of long letters, and invited me to lunch when he died so prematurely, had been dead for nearly ten years before I landed in Australia. But Kendall did not die till I had been in Australia for nearly three years. I was in Victoria when he died; I think I had actually been appointed to the Chair of Modern History in the University of Sydney before it happened, so I missed him by a very narrow margin. So little stir did his death cause in Victoria that I never even heard of it, and imagined that he had been dead for years, though he wrote lyrics only excelled in music by Shelley’s, Swinburne’s and Poe’s in the whole of English literature. Yet he had visited Melbourne, and was, in fact, there and in the company of Gordon the very day before his rival died. Kendall, unlike Gordon, was Australian born.

Far the greatest author born on Australian soil is, of course, Mrs. Humphry Ward, a Tasmanian by birth, though Australia had long passed out of her life before she wrote. “Tasma” was also a Tasmanian by birth, and “George Egerton,” whose father, Captain Dunne, fought in the New Zealand war, was born in Melbourne.

Mrs. Campbell Praed, on the other hand, was not only born in Queensland, the daughter of a prominent Queensland politician, Thomas Lodge Murray Prior, but has gone to her native land for the scene of her brilliant novels. Ill-health kept her from coming often to Addison Mansions, where she had a double claim to literary homage, for, apart from her own eminence as a novelist, she has a matrimonial connection with William Mackworth Praed, the brilliant novelist and father of Society Poetry.

Rolf Boldrewood, though born in London, has been so long in Australia that he almost counts as a Colonial (Australian born) rather than a Colonist (settler). He went to the old Sydney College in New South Wales more than seventy years ago, and though he spent the greater part of his life as a Police Magistrate and Warden of the gold-fields in New South Wales, began life as one of the pioneer squatters of Victoria. His experiences gave him a rich equipment for writing tales of wild life in the old Colonial days, like _Robbery Under Arms_, with which he made such a huge reputation in 1888. I remember him as a writer ten years before that, when he used to send a weekly _causerie_ to the _Australasian_, admirably written under his famous pseudonym. I believe that he used to call it “Under the Greenwood Tree.” He had already written and published the novel which he afterwards called _The Squatter’s Dream_. It was a thin paper volume, a sort of cross between our sixpennies and the French three francs fifty coverless novels, and it was called in those days _Ups and Downs_. It was a true story; it dealt with the ups and downs of the famous Mossgiel Station, which made John Simson’s great fortune, and the ruin by drought of the De Salis brothers who had the station before him. It was published anonymously. Rolf Boldrewood’s real name is Thomas Alexander Browne. His mother was a Miss Alexander. Both the Brownes and the Alexanders were huge men; Rolf’s brother, Sylvester Browne, was the tallest man in Australia, a couple of inches taller than my uncle, Sir Charles (who was just under six foot six, and I think may have owed some of his influence in the early days to his great stature). The Brownes were not only very tall, but very strongly-built men. Their adventurousness took them to West Australia, where they made large fortunes during the mining boom.

Guy Boothby and Louis Becke, on the other hand, both much younger men, were real Colonials, Becke having been born at Port Macquarie, New South Wales, and Boothby at Adelaide, where his father was a member of Parliament and his grandfather a Judge. That did not prevent him from leading the wildest life. At one time he was an explorer and crossed Australia from north to south. At another time he was stoker on a tramp steamer trading between Singapore and Borneo. He “struck oil” with the detective stories of Dr. Nikola, which the _Windsor Magazine_ ran in opposition to Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories in the _Strand Magazine_, and at one time was making nine thousand a year out of his writing. I remember his chartering an eight hundred ton steam yacht, and he had some wonderful prize dogs at the Manor House, close to the Kempton Park racecourse, in which he lived.

Becke was never so fortunate in his earnings, though he was a far superior writer. He acquired his wonderful knowledge of the Australian coast and the South Sea Islands as supercargo of one of the schooners which trade between the islands and Sydney. He was one of Fisher Unwin’s discoveries, and came very near achieving a _Kidnapped_ and _Treasure Island_ success, for which, as far as first-hand knowledge was concerned, he was infinitely better equipped than Stevenson.

Frank Bullen, Becke’s rival in South Sea knowledge, was not an Australian, but born in Paddington. Like Becke, he was in the Merchant Service. I have more to say about him in another chapter.

Ada Cambridge, who was for a long time the best-known novel-writer in Australia, was born in Norfolk, and spent all her time in East Anglia till she married the Rev. J. F. Cross, and sailed with him to Australia in 1870, the year of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s death. She published her first novel about seven years later. Cambridge was her maiden name.

Ethel Turner, Mrs. H. R. Curlewis, is another of the few Australian authors living in Australia who have had large publics in England. As a reviewer, I hailed with delight her first books, _Seven Little Australians_ and _The Family at Mis-Rule_, and prophesied the wide and continuous success which she has attained with her stories of child life in Australia. Mrs. Curlewis was born in Yorkshire, but she has lived in Sydney ever since I can remember.

Frances Campbell (Mrs. Howard Douglas Campbell), the author of _Love the Atonement_, _The Two Queenslanders_, and other novels, married a cousin of the late Duke of Argyll, who was out in Queensland, and commenced writing at his Grace’s suggestion. In point of fact, she came to us with a letter of introduction from him. Since then she has been an active and successful journalist, doing several special journeys abroad as correspondent for the great London dailies. She is not to be confused with Mrs. Vere Douglas Campbell, the mother of Marjorie Bowen, who is also a novelist. I made the mistake myself once.

Mrs. Mannington Caffyn, who under the pseudonym of “Iota” wrote the famous _A Yellow Aster_, was a beautiful and spirited Irish girl, the daughter of a country gentleman, who took to hospital nursing as a profession, and married a doctor, whose ill-health drove him to Australia. Her life there was full of hard experiences, but she did not make a mark in literature till her return to England. Andrew Lang was struck with the extraordinary ability of _A Yellow Aster_, and urged with all his influence one of the old classical publishing houses to bring it out, but in vain. Hutchinson saw his opportunity, accepted the book, advertised it with genius, and made a colossal success of it. Other successes followed, so real that she was able to send her growing boys to a crack public school. Another novelist not born in Australia, but resident there for some years, was “Rita,” who was educated in Sydney.

The Countess von Arnim, author of a delightful series of books from _Elizabeth and Her German Garden_ to _Fraulein Schmidt_ and _Mr. Anstruther_, was an Australian born, the daughter of Mr. Herron Beauchamp.

Haddon Chambers, one of my earliest literary friends in London, though I have seen little of him for many years, I met because we came from Australia at about the same time. He was born near Sydney, of Irish parents, and was for a while in the New South Wales Civil Service, like his father before him. Feeling, as I did, that Australia was no place for a literary career, he visited England when he was twenty, and returned to England for good when he was twenty-two, a handsome, alert, indomitable Australian boy. He looked very boyish in those days. Beginning life in England as a journalist and story-writer, he suddenly took London by storm with his play, _Captain Swift_. Captain Swift was one of the greatest parts which Beerbohm-Tree has created, and from that time forward Chambers became one of the dramatists who count.

To my mind, the best author living in Australia at the present moment is the Rev. William Henry Fitchett, President of the General Conference of the Methodist Church of Australia, editor of a magazine and a weekly newspaper, and Principal of a ladies’ college in Melbourne. He made his name with a series of remarkable books about the exploits of the British army—writing at first under the pseudonym of “Vedette.” Few men have ever written so brilliantly or so sympathetically on the subject as the author of _Fights for the Flag_ and _Deeds that Won the Empire_.

A. B. Paterson, the poet who wrote “The Man from Snowy River,” is an Australian by birth and residence. He is another of the few Australian authors who have a vogue in England without ever having lived there. He is recognised not only as one of the chief poets of Australia, but as a publicist. He is a solicitor by profession.

W. H. Ogilvy, the best living Australian poet, was not born in Australia, nor does he live there now, but he spent many years in the Australian bush, and caught its spirit better than any poet except Adam Lindsay Gordon.

The Countess of Darnley, who wrote some fiction a few years ago, was the beauty of Melbourne when I was there in the ’eighties. Lord Darnley met her when he came out to Australia with one of the English cricket elevens. He was then the Hon. Ivo Bligh, a name which will never be forgotten in the history of sport.

The charming and elegant Eleanor Mordaunt, author of _Lu of the Ranges_, the best novel ever written about hardships in Australia, is English by birth.

“_Lu of the Ranges_,” says a _nil admirari_ Australian newspaper, whose editor could not have known that she was born in England, “is a notable contribution to Australian literature.... It is solidly constructed, finely written, frank to the verge of brutality, and inherently Australian. Lu, pictured on the cover by the fool illustrator as a charming English maiden, is a drab and very human girl of the backwoods, who, to the end of her life, could not speak grammatically. Her language is the sort that looks neater printed with a dash; and she has a temper of her own. A hard, glittering, valiant personality, whom life teaches to take care of herself ‘on her own.’

“A veritable child of the bush, she was inured alike to heat and cold, to hard work and a spare diet, to an almost incredible isolation.... For the children of the bush are, above all things, old, like the primitive forms of vegetation, the wistful-eyed, prehistoric animals which are with their fellows. When they grow up and find their way to the cities, they blossom into a splendid youth, which never again quite leaves them; or else, scared and bewildered, they creep back again to the wild places whence they came. But to the irresponsible gaiety of childhood they are for ever strangers.”

It was the outcome of the seven years of struggles, more than once coming perilously near starvation, which she had in the colony of Victoria. Some of her short stories are good enough for Rudyard Kipling. That she has not assumed her place in the front rank of novelists is due only to the immense barriers to recognition which have to be surmounted owing to the mountains of fiction which are cast up every year, and stand between the new writer and fame.

When I asked Eleanor Mordaunt about her life in Australia she said—

“In Australia I edited a woman’s paper, and made gardens, and blouses for tea-room girls, and worked in an engineer’s shop at metal work, and was four times carried into public hospitals for dying. I never had a penny in the bank—and more than once not in the world. Once I lay in bed for three days because I had nothing to eat. Then came thirty pounds for a manuscript of essays from _Lothian_ of Melbourne (published 1909 under the title of _Rosemary_), and seven pounds a woman owed me for painting her a set of silk curtains, and two pounds for _The Garden of Contentment_, and I got up and went out and bought a pound of chops, and cooked and ate them all. I did all my housework at night, and all the washing.

“In Leek this time I lived on fifteen shillings a week with the weavers, and knew no one else except the two daughters of the Trade Union secretary, and never had so much love and kindness in my life. The book comes out next autumn, and is called _Bellamy_.”

Mary Gaunt, the novelist and traveller, was born and brought up in Victoria. Her father was a well-known judge in the Colony. She had met with considerable success in journalism before she left the Melbourne University.

Dr. George Ernest Morrison, who made himself so famous as correspondent of _The Times_ in Peking, was, as I have said elsewhere, a fellow-student and friend of mine at the Melbourne University, and has been a great friend ever since. It was I who persuaded Horace Cox to publish his _An Australian in China_, the only book he has ever published, though I myself conveyed to him an offer of a thousand pounds on account for a book about China before the Allied Powers invaded it. He was unwilling to enter into a contract, and the matter dropped. He has since then resigned his position on _The Times_, and become English adviser to the Government of China. His book on China, whenever it does come, will be read all over the world, because no European has ever understood Chinese politics as well as he has.

His knowledge of the country Chinese, the two hundred million toiling agricultural poor, is just as extraordinary. His gigantic journeys across China have given him a chance of seeing them as no other Anglo-Saxon, and probably no other white man, ever has seen them. His first journey was from Shanghai to Rangoon by land in 1894, which he accomplished at a cost of eighteen pounds, and on which he went unarmed, as usual. That is the journey described in _An Australian in China_. His second was from Bangkok in Siam to Yunnan city in China and round Tonquin in 1896; his third across Manchuria from Stretensk in Siberia to Vladivostok; his fourth from Peking to the border of Tonquin; his fifth from Honan city in Central China across Asia to Andijan in Russian Turkestan, nearly four thousand miles.

Morrison, whenever he came back to England from the East, used to come straight to Addison Mansions. One night he turned up about 10 p.m.

“How long have you been in London?” I asked.

“About two hours.”

The hero of so many striking adventures (in which most people would feel inclined to include the siege of Peking, for he was badly wounded in it, and without his leadership the city would have fallen) is, though his bushy hair has turned snow-white, singularly youthful-looking. His rounded clean-shaven face has not a line or a wrinkle from its long sojourn under Eastern suns. His blue eye has a merry twinkle in it which gives his face a humorous expression when it is not hardened for action. Those who have seen him in a crisis, know how stern and resolute and uncompromising it can be. He has a slim, active figure.

Just before he was appointed _Times_ correspondent in China, I approached Sir Henry Norman, who was at that time one of the editors of the _Daily Chronicle_, and whom I knew, to try and get the proprietors of that paper to give him a similar appointment in China, or in some country where Spanish is spoken, for Morrison speaks Spanish fluently. I enumerated all the qualifications which immediately afterwards led _The Times_ to make the best appointment they made since De Blowitz. At the end of it Norman just said with a cold smile, “Oh, all your geese are swans,” and changed the subject. I wondered if he ever let the proprietors of the _Chronicle_ know what a goose they had lost, and whom they could have secured for quite a moderate salary. To his honour be it known, that Moberly Bell, of _The Times_, recognised Morrison’s value the moment the young doctor approached him.

Morrison’s middle fame was of a quite unusual sort. His walk across Australia without money and without arms had been a nine days’ wonder. His gallant explorations in New Guinea, culminating in his being brought home with a barbed wooden spear-head inside him, and being sent on to Edinburgh because no one in Australia could extract it, made him a celebrity in Scotland as well as Melbourne. But when Prof. Chiene extracted the spear-head successfully, Morrison’s exploits, for the time being, were lost sight of in those of the great surgeon, and he became known as “Chiene’s case.”

G. W. Rusden, the only important historian of New Zealand and Australia till Henry Gyles Turner’s book appeared, I knew very well. We lived together, until I was married, at Cotmandene, Punt Road, South Yarra, a suburb of Melbourne. In fact, I was married from there. He had for many years been clerk of the Parliaments in Melbourne, and was actually engaged in writing his histories when we were living together. He was a strange mixture in his sentiments—a violent Tory in everything except where natives were concerned. But he was even more violent as an advocate for coloured people. At that time the Maories were giving a good deal of trouble in New Zealand, and Bryce, the Minister for Native Affairs, showed great resolution and capacity in dealing with them. This infuriated Rusden, who, partly from the yellow journals in New Zealand, and partly from Sir George Grey, who had been Governor and afterwards Premier of the Colony, gleaned a farrago of libels, accusing Bryce of murdering native women and children. He showed these reports to me triumphantly. At the risk of losing his friendship, for he was very touchy, I begged him not to make any use of these materials, which appeared to me patently false. But he persisted in inserting portions of them. Years afterwards, when both he and I were living in England, Bryce brought an action for libel against him in the London Courts on these very grounds. Rusden went to my uncle’s firm, Sladen and Wing, as his solicitors, on account of his friendship with my other uncle, Sir Charles. My cousin told me about it. “Well,” I said, “make him pay anything to keep it out of court. I was living with him when he wrote that part of his history, and saw the materials, and he hasn’t a leg to stand on.”

But Rusden was a great deal too stubborn to compromise—and the verdict against him was five thousand pounds damages.

Turner also is an old friend of mine. He was long manager of the Commercial Bank in Melbourne, and was one of the founders and editors of the _Melbourne Review_. He and the late Alexander Sutherland, who was a schoolmaster, wrote the excellent book on Australian literature which has been the foundation of all subsequent works on the subject, especially in the matter of our knowledge of Adam Lindsay Gordon.

And here I must mention my two closest Australian literary friends—Arthur Patchett Martin and Margaret Thomas. Margaret Thomas, who was brought up in Australia, though she was actually born in England, began life as a sculptor. She won the silver medal of the Royal Academy, and executed, among other public works, the memorial to Richard Jefferies in Salisbury Cathedral, and the memorials to various Somerset celebrities in the Somerset Valhalla, founded by the Kinglakes at Taunton. She was so successful also as a portrait painter that she was able to retire with a competency, and devote the rest of her life to travel and book-writing. She has written travel-books on Syria, Spain and Morocco, and hand-books on painting and sculpture. Probably no one living has such a wide knowledge of the picture-galleries of the Continent.

Patchett Martin was born at Woolwich, but went to Australia at an early age, and was educated at the Melbourne Grammar School and University. He helped to found, and edited the _Melbourne Review_, and was intimately associated with the theatre, because his sister married Garner, the principal theatrical impresario of Australia. He settled in London in 1882, and practically introduced Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poems to their popularity in England, where they had been neglected except for the reviews and articles which appeared in _Baily’s Magazine_, about the time of Gordon’s death a dozen years before. While editor of the _Melbourne Review_, Martin was among the very first to “boom” Robert Louis Stevenson, who was his model in his own delightful poems and essays. His big, burly form and hot, good-humoured face were very familiar in the Savage Club in the ’eighties.

Australian authors in London centre round the Royal Colonial Institute, and the _British Australasian_, the editor of which, Mr. Chomley, is the secretary of the literary circle at the Royal Colonial Institute, which meets on Thursday nights, and has most interesting papers and discussions.

Both the former librarian (my old friend, J. R. Boosè, who is now the secretary) and the present, P. Evans Lewin, who was for a brief period the chief librarian of South Australia, have kept the track of nearly every book which has been published about Australia or by an Australian, and Australian authors and journalists make a regular club of the Institute when they are in London.