i stow away—rescued by sailors—emigrant derelicts—i go up country—memories

there was a large tramp steamer alongside of the wharf; she was getting up steam to go away and was bound for london. i thought it was a fine opportunity to try and get a berth together, but it was no go, as they say, so my german friend and i made up our minds to stow away. i had about two shillings in my pocket, so went up into the town and bought two loaves of bread and one pound of cheese, and that night without any trouble we stole aboard and went down the stokehold and hid away in a coal bunker, and being young and optimistic we both slept well. in the morning we sat side by side in the blackness of that ship’s hold and heard the noise overhead as they hammered the main hatch down and the rusty rattle of chains as the tug boat took her in tow.

“do you think they will lock us down?” my friend said, and i began to feel in a bit of a funk; she was still alongside, and we both crawled out of our hiding-place to see if the bunker lid where we had crawled through was still open. it was shut! i am sure that we both turned white at that moment, but we were feeling desperate and my comrade climbed up and, pushing the bunker lid, to 269our intense relief it opened and let in the light.

“let’s get out of it,” i said, and in a moment we both crawled out on to the deck. we were then on the starboard side; the funnel was smoking away and the crew all on the port side drawing in the tackling; otherwise we should have been noticed. quickly creeping along the deck i saw the forward hatchway open.

“let’s get down here,” i said, and in a trice i jumped down and falling on a bale of cargo slipped to the lower hold. she was carrying a light cargo and was evidently going to call somewhere else before fastening down for the long voyage across the world. i had fallen with a fearful smash, and looking up to see what had become of my chum i saw his face peep over the hatch-side and then dodge away as the crew overhead lifted up the hatchway covering and down it came with a crash. all was at once dark. i was then alone, a prisoner at the bottom of that ship’s hold.

at first i felt dazed and strangely calm; then i suddenly realised my position and cried out at the top of my voice and scrambled about in the dark over the bales of cargo trying to get up to the hatchway and make myself heard. what happened to my friend i don’t know; he certainly never told the crew about me, and though i hoped he had done so i hoped on in vain and lay there almost breathless with horror as the time went on. then i felt the motion of the vessel as she moved away and before 270nightfall i heard the seas beating against the ship’s iron side as i sat imprisoned in the dark below the water line in the worst predicament that i ever was in in my life. to make things worse out came the rats! it seemed to me that there were thousands of them scampering about the cargo as i shouted myself hoarse, praying to god that i should at last be heard, and when everything seemed hopeless i sat for a time and felt pretty bad.

presently a reaction set in and i started exploring, thinking that if i could get up forward toward the fo’c’sle i could thump on the deck and the sailors in the off watch would hear me. i began to feel terribly sick as the vessel pitched and rolled and the smell of the cargo thickened the already stifling atmosphere till i heard myself breathing heavily.

crawling slowly along i managed to get to between-decks, and to my intense relief i saw a wisp of light through a chink. you can imagine my delight at that moment as i made towards it. it was the forepeak hatchway. i heard voices; someone was sitting on it! placing my mouth against that crack i shouted “hello!” and i heard the voices suddenly cease and someone jump; as quickly as possible i shouted once more through the crack. “it’s all right, i’m a stowaway! don’t give me away.” “who are you, matey?” came the answer. all my old courage returned to me when i heard that gruff kindly voice, and i quickly enlightened the questioner, and in ten minutes i was out and snug in the fo’c’sle sitting on a sea-chest, the crew around me. they 271were english sailors and you can bet they did not give me away. i discovered that we were calling in at sydney. it was an easy matter to keep me hidden for two days in there among them. the only one i had to keep out of sight from was the bos’n.

we had a fine time that night; one of the men had a banjo and another a fiddle. i borrowed it from them and we had a concert to ourselves. they fed me up too, i can assure you that sailors are the finest men in the world to fall in with when you are down on your luck. it was an easy matter when we arrived in sydney harbour for me to get away, and they managed it. as soon as the anchor dropped and we got alongside they gave me the tip, down the gangway i went, and some of them stood grinning on the deck as i stood on the wharf safe and waved my hand back to them.

i had a good wash and brush up and soon looked very different to what i did when those sailors first discovered me, begrimed, smothered in coal dust and perspiration. there i was, once more thrown up on the beach in sydney.

i will draw a veil over a good many of the days of my life after that time. i fell in with the ne’er-do-wells of the australian cities, the happy-go-lucky castaways of “better times,” who slept out on the “domain,” in dustbins and in the cave holes of the rocky shore round by the botanical gardens, where you could sleep and hear the waters creeping, singing up the shore by your pillow all night long, as you slept a penniless beggar far from your native 272land. you could open your eyes in the silent hours of the night and see the outbound sailing ships as the rigging flitted across the moonlight and the crew sang some homebound song as the ship met the outer foams and started on the long, long track home. the awful stench from woolloomoolloo bay came on the wind round the bend at intervals, like the hot breath of reality across your dreams.

i read some wonderful poems in those days, sad ones too, poems with weary eyes that told the remorse, the long remembering, but not the tale itself. dressed in rags i have seen them sleeping on “the rocks” as the white australian moonlight revealed pinched refined faces; men they were from the cities of the world, who were hiding from their homeland disgrace, and some who had believed the arabian night tales from the land of the golden fleece, sold up their all in england to sink to the lowest depths of poverty and humiliation in the country where it is every man for himself and god for the lot.

how well i remember that time and those nights among the lost brigade, as they slept huddled around me on the matting of the “donkey’s breakfast,” as they call the bunk mattresses which are thrown away and piled up in wharf sheds when emigrant ships arrive. snoring wrecks, a few with low-bred faces who could not read or write and others with refined-looking faces notwithstanding the scrubby beard that half hid them, many boys also around, too shabby to get work and too wretched 273to want it. one young fellow, through starvation and homesickness, went off his head. he had an emotional, girlish face and was not more than eighteen years of age. we cheered him up and i’m sure i did my best, but he would keep muttering to himself and swore that spirits were charging him in regiments all night long as he howled and brandished his arms about fighting them. one night he got up and ran off; we heard a splash in the bay. he was buried out at “rookwood” with the hundreds of others who sleep in nameless graves, forgotten for years, till lloyd’s weekly says, “wanted, the whereabouts of a. b.; left home in the year ——. mother inquires.”

i have been telling you the seamy side of the life of the seaboard cities. of course it is not all seamy. sydney flourishes and is happy, with her big streets, her skirts dipping into the bay, her bright botanical gardens, a kind of tropical hyde park kissed by curling sea waves, and near those gardens is the wide domain. what a happy hunting-ground for an australian charles dickens that domain would have been, and still is! the emigrants still go seaward and are dumped down to scramble to hell or dubious fame and fortune, while the ships go flying homeward to old england full up with the remnants who landed on the preceding voyage out!

after coming ashore from my stowaway trip, i lodged in a small top room in lower george street, which was very different to upper george street. 274by my dwelling-house the chinese lived in their opium dens. some of them were very well off and had managed to secure white wives. how those white women could stand them i don’t know. at sundown they would stand by their den doors and looked like mummies peeping from their upright coffins with twinkling eyes! wrinkled yellow faces they had, and you could always tell their presence by the peculiar smell that came in faint whiffs from their shop doors mingled with the odour of orange pekoe, for they mostly sold tea or pretended to, but really played “fan-tan” in those gambling dens, and did other awful things as the innocent old shrivelled spy stood at the door watching, picking his yellow teeth with a long skewer. no one in australia has ever seen a chinaman drunk; he takes his opium and nectar in an arm-chair in the stuffy room at the back of his shop, and with his long opium pipe in his mouth goes off back to china in dreams, when his stupefied head no longer hears the traffic outside as the crowds hurry by and the jack tars from the men-o’-war boats in the bay go rollicking up the street “half seas over,” singing, arm in arm, and inside that innocent-looking den the white wife goes through the celestial’s pockets as the australian “bum” stands up at the street corner waiting with greedy hand to receive his half. five hundred yards up the street stood the splendid post office and all the business shops of the commercial world of sydney.

cabbage-tree palms and bush land

after a month’s stay in the town i once more 277went up country and secured work on a station, staying there nearly nine months. i became quite colonised as i toiled in the pumpkin fields, rode for miles over the slopes behind the flying sheep, and slept in a little outhouse by the stockman’s homestead. i would sit and dream of home as over my head the parrots wheeled away toward the sunset and the station children romped and screamed with laughter. sometimes as i sat thinking and remembering my mind wandered back to queensland and ethel’s grave in the bush. i often lay in that little hut unable to sleep till dawn crept over the gum tops and the lyre-bird’s song chimed the first peeps of sunrise over the hills. two miles away was another station whereon worked two other young englishmen. i often rode across the bush at sundown to see them and we would sit and yarn together about england, and all get homesick over our dreams. dell, the youngest of the two, was thrown from his horse and killed. his friend william and i often went across at evening time and placed flowers on his grave and then walked away with thick throats, unable to speak to each other.

the australian bush is the most melancholy place in the world to brood over sorrows. the music of most of the bush birds has a prophetic note in it—they wail away as though foretelling dire disaster; after sunset myriads of frogs and locusts start to chant and chirrup mournfully; over the solitude comes at long intervals the wail of the dingo, and often like the phantom of some lost dead child from 278the gullies a wailful scream from a bird that no one ever sees. i have often lain in my bunk by night and looked through the little window hole and watched the migrating cranes and other birds with long outstretched necks pass under the moon, bound southward; they looked just like skeletons on wings, their bones tinkling together as they passed swiftly across the moonlit sky right overhead. i devoted a good deal of my time to music and violin-playing in those quiet bush nights, and some of the very melodies which are in the strains of my military band solos were composed at that period.

william and i became close friends, linked together by the sorrow over our dead comrade, and eventually we gave notice to our employers and both went off “on the wallaby” and “humped the bluey,” as they say in the bush.

we followed that life for a long time and became real “sundowners.” the atmosphere of that roving life has never wholly left my mind; the songs of the birds in the gums and the winds moaning and bending the leafy clump tips overhead during the nights, as we slept below, still echo through my memories. he and i were happy together, and i found him a beautiful friend. i can see his sky-blue eyes now, as he wondered and listened to me when i told him of my adventures in the south sea islands. night after night we would sit by our camp fire and stare, side by side, into the glowing embers as overhead sang some sweet night bird, serenading our memories as we dreamed of 279home. my chum had a quiet earnest voice and would sit there and sing wild sea chanteys as i played an accompaniment on the violin.

and often in the night i hear,

above the wind and rain,

my old chum singing in the hills

those wild sea songs again.

he had an old bent-up cornet in his swag, and i took a few lessons from him, and while i practised the scales in the silence of the night the very hills seemed astonished as the echoes answered one another and died away across the solitude, and away the frightened bush animals scampered as though the devil was after them! and sometimes in the daytime as the parrots passed overhead across the blinding sky they would hear those notes and croak dismally and hurry faster on their skyward voyage.

one evening, just as we were camping for the night, we sighted over the slope a genuine old bushman tramping along with his swag on his back. we invited him to stay the night; it took a long time to wake him up, but we succeeded, and his scrubby sunburnt face lit up with delight as my comrade sang and i played the fiddle. i never before or since saw such a dried-up old relic as he was. he had a big broken nose and black teeth through chewing tobacco plug for many years. i never saw him spit; he swallowed the juice. we managed to draw a few remarks out of him, and i remember him saying that he had known ned kelly the bushranger in the 280early days and mumbled a deal about how the times had changed and the meanness of the station bosses, for he seemed to get his living by cadging at the stations as he tramped along from day to day and month by month, looking for work. he seemed very methodical in his habits, for as we sat by the fire talking, and darkness came swiftly across the slopes, he at once carefully took his boots off—he did not wear socks—and, placing them side by side under his dirty blanket swag, put his feet toward the camp fire, laid flat on his back, bit a large bit of black tobacco plug off, and chewing the end fell asleep.

he left us in the morning at daybreak, went across the scrub with his swag on his back and disappeared under the gums and never looked back once.

some of those old swagsmen are wise old men with venerable grey beards, mouths that seldom speak, and their grey eyes gaze steadily as though they can see through you, for they have wonderful instinct developed through years of practice.