Buvelot’s paintings of cattle grazing at Templestowe and Coleraine, and also his 1869 waterpool near Coleraine, do seem European in landscape, but looked to his contemporaries like an exciting blend of northern Europe and the Antipodes. Frederick McCubbin felt that A Summer Afternoon near Templestowe was ‘thoroughly Australian’ despite the fact that it did not look anything like the bush McCubbin himself would paint. Buvelot was the Melbourne painter of his day who was most likely to be exhibited (and bought), and his work was shown at the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866. Julian Ashton and Tom Roberts knew him when they were young and were impressed by his resemblance to Leonardo da Vinci.
Julian Ashton, father of art in Sydney for more than half a century after he moved there in 1883, claimed in Melbourne in 1882 that he was the first Australian painter to complete a painting in the open. John Ford Paterson and John Mather, both Scots and friends of Alfred Deakin, liked the outdoors and sketched in the Healesville district and along the eastern shores of Port Phillip Bay in the Heidelberg area. But it was the four major figures of the Heidelberg School—Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin, who at the end of Australia’s first century were in their early thirties, and Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder, who were just twenty—whose paintings would convey powerfully the sense of being in the bush. Ironically their adventures in the wilderness, as rich as they were in paintings, involved a journey of perhaps at most 20 kilometres from Melbourne.
IRRIGATION AND THE REDEMPTION OF AUSTRALIA
In 1884 Alfred Deakin, a visionary young Liberal, was put in charge of a Victorian Royal Commission into matters of irrigation.
Alfred Deakin was then a young barrister of twenty-eight years of age, the son of one of those who had gone to the goldfields in 1851. He had a restless intelligence and embraced theosophism and spiritism, believing that even contact with the dead could be achieved by scientific means and could be proven to be governed by natural laws. In 1882 he married nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Brown, the daughter of a wealthy Melburnian who was also a prominent spiritualist. If there was a solution to spirit contact, there certainly was a solution to the problem of water. And so the idea of irrigation did not daunt Deakin—like others, he was excited and relieved by its prospects.
Irrigation was for Deakin almost the sister dream to that of Federation. He had been inflamed by stories of Californian irrigation schemes which he heard from one Steven Cureton, an Australian newly home from Los Angeles, during a train journey in which he happened to share a train compartment with the young man. Deakin and others thought that in the irrigation of the arid Central Valley of California lay a technology which could be applied to Australia. On Christmas Eve 1884 he left for California with an engineer who had some experience of irrigation work and two newspaper correspondents, E.S. Cunningham representing the Age and J.L. Dowell of the Argus. He wished them to be promoters of his discoveries in California.
In Los Angeles, Deakin and his party met George Chaffey, a Canadian who, with his brother William, was a citizen of Ontario—not the province of Canada, but an irrigation settlement in the desert 40 miles (64 kilometres) east of Los Angeles on the Santa Ana River. It had been settled by Canadians in planned temperance communities. The settlements of Ontario and Etiwanda, which the Chaffeys founded between them, had been based upon the purchase of land and water rights by the Chaffey family at a low price, the land being resold to settlers in 10-acre blocks, with a mutual irrigation company being formed to distribute water as a non-profit enterprise. Cement pipes were used in the main water channels.
George Chaffey impressed Deakin with the force of his own character and with the technological change he had brought to irrigation. In the copious notebooks the Australian brought back to Melbourne lay the means, he believed, for ‘the conquest of those areas hitherto regarded as worthless’. Only irrigation could provide ‘her arid districts a permanent prosperity’. In the meantime, George, the elder and more restless of the brothers, decided to go to Melbourne and pursue irrigation works in the colony of Victoria. When he arrived in February 1886, full of the zeal for temperance, righteousness and water technology, he had already been warned by Deakin and others that he would not be able to obtain a land grant on terms identical to those in California, but that something favourable could be worked out. Nonetheless, Chaffey did not understand that Australians looked more to government to provide major public works, unlike the Americans, who looked to free enterprise. But George did a tour of the Murray Valley and became excited by its capacity to support irrigation.
Deakin was able to assure George Chaffey that the government would make available a quarter of a million acres of Crown land on favourable terms, and George at once sent a cable to his brother William telling him to sell up all their interests in California and follow him to Australia. George selected the desolate region of an abandoned sheep station, Mildura in the Mallee, for his first irrigation settlement. It had the disadvantage of being hundreds of miles from the railway at Swan Hill. But the Chaffey brothers signed a compact with the Victorian government guaranteeing that it would spend at least £300 000 on permanent improvements in Mildura over the next twenty years.
The bill which Deakin introduced to the House to confirm the arrangement was opposed, and the Chaffeys were described by some as ‘cute Yankee land grabbers’. Sir John Downer, Premier of South Australia, hearing of this opposition to the Chaffeys, steamed to Melbourne and offered them 250 000 acres in his colony, and soon the Chaffeys had selected Murray River frontages in the Renmark area. In any case, since no competing tenders for Mildura had been received, the Chaffeys went ahead there too. For the next four years, George worked at an astonishing pace, overseeing and developing both areas as irrigation centres. William remained at Mildura and a younger brother, Charles, arrived to manage the Renmark area.
By December 1890, 3300 people had settled at Mildura and 1100 at Renmark. The towns were well surveyed and shaded by trees planted in the manner of Ontario and Etiwanda. But the settlers became disgruntled at the Chaffeys’ Mildura Irrigation Company’s charges for water, and the Crown Law Department told the Chaffeys that the subdivisions were entitled to free water. Many attacks on the Chaffeys were made in the Victorian Parliament, and even more so when the economy collapsed in the 1890s. The settlers themselves were offended by the brusqueness and officiousness of the Chaffeys and combined to try to get rid of them and substitute the Victorian government as their landlord. So, in August 1895, the colony’s Mildura Irrigation Trust took over the functions of the Chaffeys’ Mildura Irrigation Company.
On 10 December 1894 Chaffey Brothers Limited went into liquidation with assets of 438 acres of unsold land at Mildura and Renmark. The Bank of Victoria, which had earlier supported the Chaffeys’ endeavour, foreclosed on the mortgages of hundreds of settlers along the river, but in the end the irrigation schemes survived under government supervision. In 1896 Premier Sir George Turner, Victoria’s first native-born premier, a shabbily dressed but urbane Federationist, appointed a Royal Commission to inquire into the Mildura matter. The report, which was tabled in 1897, blamed the Chaffeys for the Mildura failure, citing their lack of planning and their dependence on finance. All this, however, left the belief in the holiness and God-ordained quality of irrigation undaunted in Alfred Deakin.
In August that year, as the report was being presented to the premier, George Chaffey had sailed to the United States where he tapped underground water to revive the Ontario settlement and diverted the water of the Colorado River to irrigate the desert west of San Diego. He named the region Imperial Valley, and it was successful. William Chaffey, on the other hand, remained at Mildura, working an orchard of 81 hectares and establishing the Mildara Winery Pty Ltd. He died there in June 1926, having been Mildura’s first mayor, and long after his death the belief that irrigation was the answer to Australia’s disappointing inland rainfall remained powerful. His son was killed in the AIF in World War I.
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BUSHRANGERS, TIME, ART
There is a picture that most people interested in bushrangers are familiar with. It is taken on a winter’s morning in 1880 by the side of Benalla police barracks, and it shows the body of a young man strung up in a doorway, stricken rigid by death. His body had been transported here from the place he fell dead from a gunshot wound, Glenrowan, Victoria, while calling on his saviour for forgiveness. He seems to stand in the photo but the stance is crumpled. His name was Joe Byrne, who came from the area named Woolshed near Beechworth, and he was Ned Kelly’s lieutenant. He had been dead about a day at the time the photograph was taken.
To me this is more than a photograph of a bushranger’s body and yokel onlookers, but is a point of juncture between worlds, and between visions of Australia. And it is strangely post-modern as well—the photographer has photographed yet another photographer who is photographing the dead bushranger. Photographers in that age tried not to acknowledge the presence of their own camera, let alone that of others.
This was certainly the case with the man who took the Joe Byrne photograph, J.W. Lindt, a German photographer whose prints were very popular in Australia. He had created a successful studio photograph entitled Aboriginal Man and Woman with Kangaroo, involving an Aboriginal male with a kangaroo-skin skirt, his wife, seated, holding a large boomerang, and a dead kangaroo, the work of a taxidermist, lying with its head on a log in front of them and with a boomerang between its paws. The picture of Joe Byrne taken by this vigorous young German, using the wet plate process since he had rushed up from his society studio in Collins Street, was astoundingly impromptu therefore. One of the bush bystanders, shirt-sleeved this cold morning, is scratching his nose as he talks to others. A boy child moves and his face becomes a blur on the plate. Someone, maybe the photographer being photographed—the government photographer A.W. Berman, who is up much closer to Joe’s body—has slung his overcoat in the fork of a bare tree. And on the left of the camera, in a bowler hat and a good overcoat, taking no direct interest in what Lindt is doing, a man with a pad under his arm is turning away, having finished his sketches of the aftermath of the Kelly climax in Glenrowan.
This man is a young Englishman, Julian Ashton, artist, up from Melbourne to make sketches for David Syme, the editor of the Age and of an illustrated paper, the Australian News. Ashton looks like a robust young man, even though he has asthma and has immigrated in a mistaken belief that Australia will be good for it.
Julian Rossi Ashton, having finished with poor Joe and turned away, was a different sort of Australian beast. In his early twenties he had studied painting at the Académie Julian in Paris, and had his work accepted by the Royal Academy of Arts. He would ultimately move to Sydney and, through his presidency of the Art Society, establish a tradition of professional art and found his own painting school, whose students would include George Lambert, Thea Proctor, Sidney Smith and William Dobell. On their way to the future Ashton and his younger brother, who also worked for David Syme, brush past a limping, sturdy block of a young man escorted by two policemen. Ned Kelly. Though severely wounded, Kelly amazed all with the strength of his constitution, though he would be borne from the train, once it arrived in Melbourne, on a very elaborate litter. Julian Ashton would similarly amaze men with his endurance.
The hunters and police would have their picture taken too by that door once Byrne’s body is taken down. In their midst is Superintendent Sadleir, whose fire on a Glenrowan hotel full of civilians had been so reckless that the question of criminality had become a sliding term that night. By the time that photo was taken, Ashton was well and truly gone. He had turned his back on all that. He was heading in the direction of his own regimen of sketching and, at least through later artist friends, Impressionism.
A RUSSIAN IN NEW GUINEA
It could meanwhile be argued that one of the influences on Australia’s early concentration on New Guinea was a Russian naturalist. Nicholai Nicholaievich Miklouho-Maklai (Maclay), born in July 1846 in Novgorod province, was an extraordinary Russian natural scientist who, in his labours, concentrated on the Torres Strait region. As a result of training in Leipzig and Jena, he was motivated to study the natural history and ethnography of New Guinea, and first settled near Astrolabe Bay in what is now north-east Madang province in 1871, and lived there for two years. With the characteristic and unthinking hubris of the Europeans of his day, he named the stretch of coastline extending 320 kilometres east from Astrolabe Bay ‘Maklaya’ or, as it became known, the Maclay coast. On 20 January 1880, Maclay joined the London Missionary Society missionary James Chalmers on a mission schooner to visit the southern coast of New Guinea. By now, said Maclay, there were a dozen pearling-shell stations operating eighty-eight vessels in the Torres Strait—the captains working for Sydney companies and often exploiting native divers. He sought to advise the natives at Kalo Kalo near Milne Bay on how to deal with the realities of European justice.
Though during his absence in Batavia local natives destroyed his hut and killed his native supporters, Maclay remained a passionate advocate against their exploitation by Europeans, and would appeal on their behalf for their protection by Dutch, British and German authorities, pleading with them to prevent Australian blackbirding in the region, and the trade in guns and liquor. On a visit to Australia he investigated further the trade in Kanaka labour, but also the comparisons between Aboriginal, Chinese, Malay and New Guinean skulls. Maclay visited Mer, Murray Island, the home of people from whom eventually Eddie Mabo would be born. Here he was appalled by the activities of a London Missionary Society native teacher named Josiah and his use of the lash. He was so uncomfortably vocal about all this that some Queensland politicians justified the seizure of New Guinea by Queensland in 1883 by arguing that proposals had been made to the Russian government by a certain Baron ‘Maclay-Miklouho’ to annexe New Guinea and to establish a Russian naval, coaling and trading station there.
Maclay was involved in petitioning the Colonial Office to grant land rights to the natives of Maklaya when in November 1884 the Germans annexed north-east New Guinea. In that same year he had made a robust Australian connection through his meeting with the widowed daughter of prominent New South Wales politician Jack Robertson. Maclay would marry Margaret in Vienna on the way to visit his family estates in Russia. Nursed by her, he would die in Russia in 1888, at the age of only forty-two, his purpose to return to Australia and New Guinea to continue both his studies and his advocacy unfulfilled.
CELESTIALS IN SOUTHERN AUSTRALIA
In 1871 a sergeant of police in Ballarat took Anthony Trollope on a tour of the Chinese quarter. The novelist was shocked by what he saw in the hovels and opium dens. ‘Boys and girls are enticed among them, and were with them, and become foul, abominable, and inhuman.’ But white people were polluted by the Celestials in other ways. Eighteen white prostitutes lived at the Chinese camp in Narrandera amongst 303 male Chinese residents. A survey of the biggest Chinese camps in the Riverina in 1883 showed that out of 800 Chinese males living in the region, thirty-six were married to white women. Some clergy refused to conduct the marriage ceremonies. It was said that one ‘Highland clergyman’ married a China man to a white woman with the words, ‘You two I declare one mutton.’
As well as for their supposed hunger for fair flesh and opium, the Chinese developed a repute for gambling and sometimes found themselves locked up for playing Fan-tan, a relatively harmless card game. To help their brethren in the face of threat, the Chinese in Australia, particularly the merchants, set up societies and self-help clubs. The oldest, the Csee Yap Society, was founded by Louis Ahmouy in 1854. The Csee Yap rules were that all Chinese who came to seek gold ‘must love and help each other’. The society favoured the idea that its members would find gold, then go home with it rather than settle locally. One of the tasks of the society was to bury those who did not get home in the appropriate manner. The Chinese practices of ‘feasting the dea
d’, funeral feasts where chickens were devoured and firecrackers let off, seemed outlandish to white miners and townspeople. The dead were buried with such goods as would see them through eternity—roasted fowls, rice and money. In Melbourne twenty or thirty horse cabs were loaded with Chinamen and set off every third Sunday of the month, the day for visiting the dead, in procession to the cemetery. Once every two years, the coffins of those long buried were dug up, the bones washed, sometimes in creeks, and shipped back to China in cases or carpet bags.
Though the Chinese were condemned for smoking opium in Chinese opium dives, the reason opium was not legislated against was that it was a major ingredient in patent medicines, including those which tuberculosis sufferers ingested to help them through their last days. The New South Wales government permitted the unrestricted importation of opium at a duty of 10 shillings per pound, raising considerable revenue. It was not until 1893 that H.W. Hunt, Secretary of the Victorian Society of the Suppression of the Opium Traffic, was able to get a bill through the Victorian Parliament banning the free use of opium.
GRANDMOTHERLY LEGISLATION AND THE PRIVILEGES OF DISEASE
Melbourne’s weak point as it grew into a city of pretentions was the Yarra itself, apparently so poisonous in odour that no one could work near it without smoking tobacco to mask its stench. The Bulletin referred to Melbourne as ‘Marvellous Smelbourne’, for the Yarra was the Melbourne sewer into which liquid refuse from buildings, stables, factories of all kinds and urinals made their way by channels, constructed and informal, into the river. Some compared it to Port Said, and on 24 January 1889 the Argus quoted an observer as saying, ‘I never saw a dirtier city than Melbourne, not even among the Heathen Chinee.’ As late as the 1890s Michael Davitt, travelling in Australia to raise money for Irish Home Rule, found the approaches to Melbourne unfortunate. ‘To see it without your prejudices being excited, through gasworks and tanneries on the one hand, or the Liffey-like odour of the channel of the Yarra river . . . you would have to drop in upon the city in a balloon sailing down from the region of Mount Macedon.’