Cattle Chosen/Chapter 1

I
THE OCCASION AND THE SCENE OF SETTLEMENT

decade after a great war brings more than their normal share of parental anxiety upon the professional classes. The army and the navy are reducing their war-swollen lists of officers, and accepting very few. The value of fixed incomes is low. Manners and morals, essential factors in the mental equipment of the professional man, are still molten and formless from the crucible of war. At such a time, the task of a clergyman, in training and finding careers for a large family of boys, always an anxious one, must challenge all his resource of purse and character. When, therefore, in 1820, — a year of gloom even for post-Napoleonic England — William Marchant Bussell, 'perpetual curate' of St. Mary's, Portsea, Hants, died suddenly, leaving a widow under forty, and nine young children, the call to succour the widow and the fatherless was clamant and plain. His parishioners eased, by such monetary aid as they could give, the burden of the children's education.

John Garrett Bussell, the eldest son, was at Winchester, 'on the foundation', a likely candidate for the close scholarship at New College, and intended, in the family counsels, for holy orders. William, the second boy, was to enter the Royal College of Surgeons, and the third, Lenox, the navy. What was to be done for Charles, Vernon and Alfred, aged at their father's death nine, six, and four? The girls, Mary, Frances, and Elizabeth would presumably marry in due course. Their father had provided for each of them, as for each of the boys, an endowment policy of £500, with the Pelican Insurance Office, payable at the age of twenty-one. But his stipend ceased with his death, and the family's only property was a field at Kingsford, leased for eight pounds a year!

It was a crisis to which middle-class parents, bent upon shielding their own from such anxieties, could not be unresponsive.

Friends and relatives of William Marchant Bussell promptly gathered sufficient money to buy £3 ,000 in consols, and settled the income upon the widow for her life. A place at the Bluecoat School, Christ's Hospital, was obtained for Charles, and Vernon and Alfred began their schooling at Winchester. For a decade the widow, whose maiden name had been Frances Louisa Yates, watched over her boys' training. Financially, success in preparing each for a profession was just within her reach by using each payment of the 'Pelican moneys' to meet the later years' expenses of the next younger son. The plan was based, however, on the most faithful self-denial by each and all, and to that requirement William, as a medical student in his later years, and Lenox, as a young naval officer on Mediterranean stations, seem to have been less than true. Mother and daughters, living largely with relatives in the Thames Valley, at Portsea and at Plymouth, kept up appearances and practised evangelical gentility, but their anxiety lest Charles, Vernon and Alfred should prove unsteady too must have deepened. John Garrett Bussell, future head of the family, did not disappoint them. True, he had missed by one vacancy, the scholarship to New College, but he had entered at Trinity, Oxford, with an exhibition, and after two years in residence had won a second exhibition in the gift of the President and Fellows of his College. A further reward of merit gave him the means of paying almost all his college bills without recourse to the slender family purse. At Winchester, suffering hard treatment as a fag, he had vowed never to illtreat his own fag, if he became a prefect. He kept the vow, and when he went up to Oxford, his fag ran away from school to follow him. The fag's guardian, when she sent the boy back to Winchester, settled a hundred a year on John while he was at Oxford, in grateful expression of the truant's goodwill. Graduating B.A. in Trinity Term 1829, John fully intended entering the Church, and sought ordination by the Bishop of Sarum. The Bishop put him off — he was not ordaining again until 11th October.

The family destiny, working hitherto on conventional lines, took at this point a strange turn into colonial emigration. The deflecting impulse came from Charles, who had just left school. Taller than his brothers, lithe and highly-strung, Charles thought himself cursed in the presence of strangers by a bad stammer. Later in life, during one of his rare tastes of town gaiety, he thus bemoaned his handicap: 'My society is found not only a bore, but insupportable, thanks to the mimicking propensities of my earlier years. I sometimes endeavour to think what kind of a character I should have been if I had not stammered, for I can imagine nothing that would tend more to alter a man than this defect. To feel upon occasions that you could afford the very information that parties in conversation are seeking, and to be obliged to hold your peace; to feel, at all events in your own conceit, that you could be witty, and to be compelled to preserve the stiff and rigid features of a mere listener! But I have done with society. I came up here with the idea of accepting every invitation offered me, and shall therefore for this once play the game through. But it is the last time. I have scarcely entered a house without some person or another laughing in my face. Male and female alike have been guilty of this indelicacy. But I have nothing to complain of, for, after all, I have no right to intrude, an insupportable nuisance, upon perfect strangers, I am literally sighing for the greenwood shade.' — Charles Bussell to J. G. B., 22. i. '38, from Perth, W.A.

A professional career was utterly repellent to such a misanthrope. It would involve what he dreaded most, incessant contact with strangers. Here, therefore, was a mind inwardly poised to accept with alacrity the ideas of emigration to a new land, and a self-reliant settlement in its solitudes. Once enlisted in the advocacy of such a course, Charles was aided, in the persuasion of his mother and sisters, by their increasing doubts of professional training for boys left without a father's guidance. General and personal circumstances joined to press upon the Bussells the colonizing idea. Every letter from officers on service in New South Wales to their friends and relatives in the southern English ports told of rich fortunes to be made at wool-growing and land-owning, of low prices for the necessaries of life, and of fertile plains begging for occupation. One such was written from Liverpool, N.S.W., about this time, by Lietuenant J. G. Spicer, whose sister J. G. Bussell was to marry seven years later:

'Since my arrival in this colony I have had the long wished-for pleasure of meeting my brother Peter. I spent four months with him at Moreton Bay. It is a very pleasant country, and there is much amusement to be derived from the sport it affords. The surrounding woods and hills abound with all sorts of game, The kangaroos are very numerous, also wild turkeys, geese, black swans, pelicans, parrots and cockatoos. Peter and I spent many happy days together there with our guns and dogs.... I have lately been so fortunate as to obtain an appointment under Government as Superintendent of Convicts and principal overseer of works in this district. The salary allowed me is but small, £8o per annum, a good garden and a house. You would be delighted to see me feeding my poultry of a morning, of which I have 20 fowls, three ducks and two broods of chickens. I have seven goats, too, and a fine cow with a calf by its side, which I bought the other day for the small sum of 23s. You will think this a wonderful bargain, but the average price of cattle here is only £1 per head. Everything else is proportionally cheap. Bread is 2d. per pound, beef 2d. per pound, mutton 2½d. per pound, tea 1s 6d., sugar, 3d. butter 6d., fowls fit for use 2s. per pair. At this rate I can afford to live comfortably at very little expense.... I should like to have a little land in this colony. I don't mean a grant or a farm, but building ground, for I assure you there is nothing as profitable as houses. It requires some capital to begin with, but then there is no danger. One hundred pounds will go as far as £5OO in England. I should never think of sending money home, for even bank interest is never below 8 per cent.; at present it is 10 per cent.... A single gentleman here, with a little economy, might keep his carriage on £150 a year. Clothes are as cheap in Sydney as in London.'

But there were dark shadows over these Elysian fields which made them unattractive to the widow and her sons. Lieutenant Spicer adds: 'My only ambition is to make myself independent of my employment under Government. I have here now under my charge, to clothe, victual and keep in constant employment, seventy prisoners. I have tO muster them all every day and on Sundays see them attend Church. I have likewise twenty others, holding tickets of leave, to muster on Sundays at Church. Amongst these is Capt. K—, R.N., brother to Sir E— K—. This unfortunate man is at present employed by a poor settler as shepherd, and has always conducted himself in a very meritorious manner, having taken several notorious bushrangers, for which he received a ticket of leave and three years taken off his sentence; but it is still shocking to see a gentleman so degraded, and ranked up before the Church door with twenty others to be inspected by the superintendent and magistrates. There are many others similarly situated. I have a clerk, a very clever fellow, who has been an attorney for several years in London. About a month ago a great man in Sydney was robbed of four thousand pounds. Fourteen or fifteen years before he was flogged at a cart's tail in London for stealing geese, and since then had beentran sported to this place for picking pockets. However, he has found his money, and the thief, who proved to be his servant, was executed two days ago. The first of whom he had suspicion was his wife. He was just on the point of prosecuting her when the poor fellow who took the money confessed.... I am tired of this villainous place; it is dangerous to go out of sight of the town, day or night, for the bushrangers are becoming so desperate that scarcely a day passes without a robbery being committed somewhere. About six weeks ago a hundred desperate fellows broke loose at a place called Bathurst. Having seized the soldiers, after killing several they took their arms and ammunition. They pressed everyone they met and made them fight, and many who refused were murdered on the spot. They drove everything before them, entered the houses of respectable settlers, and after taking everything that was useful, burnt them to the ground. However, they were all suppressed in good time, and many have suffered severely for their madness.'—J. G. Spicer, to J. G. Cookworthy, January 1830.

The Bussells cannot have seen that particular letter, for they had left England late in 1829, but many another, telling of the strange high lights and shadows in colonial life, must have passed around the semi-official circles in which they lived.

It was inevitable that the service families in crowded England should sigh for new settlements, blessed by the rude plenty which Spicer reported, but free of convicts. There were then no free Australian colonies. Moreton Bay and Van Dieman's Land were more besmirched than Sydney and its adjacent 'nineteen counties'. South Australia and Victoria were not yet. But the dream of free societies, in which the first arrivals might be granted wide areas, and thus found landed families like the old Norman barons, was being spread by every letter from Sydney. When, therefore, in 1829, Captain James Stirling, a fellow officer of the Bussells' kinsman, Captain Robert Yates, R.N., called for settlers to colonize the Swan River District, in Western Australia, the lively hope of favours to come from the governor reinforced the prospect of free grants of land in an area pronounced by Stirling 'not inferior to the Plain of Lombardy'.

Land in the new colony was to be given, ultimately in fee simple, to every settler of means, in proportion to the stock and equipment he brought to the work of its development. All arriving before the close of 1829 were to receive forty acres for every three pounds they invested, subject to reasonable conditions of occupation and use within ten years. Along fertile river-valleys, enjoying a climate to describe which the English language was being 'taxed to the utmost for epithets of admiration ', they would build up a new society, escaping the penury and depression of the old world and the repulsive lawlessness of the new.

Charles Bussell, predisposed by his stammering to seek a life of seclusion, embraced the project with enthusiasm, and his brothers Vernon and Alfred in their sixteenth and fourteenth years were all agog for such an adventure. What youthful spirit could have resisted it? John, filling in the time before his ordination as tutor to the sons of Mr. John Fleming, M.P., met on the Isle of Wight, a Waterloo veteran, one Captain John Molloy of the Rifle Brigade, and learned of his determination to settle in Western Australia with his young bride. Mrs. Bussell saw safe careers for the younger boys, and a way of using the family income to advantage, investing their small capital, as it became available, in virgin fields, which, in a simpler society, they might work with their own hands. She appealed to John to give up his hopes of the Church, and to lead the first party. John consulted with Mr. Fleming, and with Captain Yates, the family's chief trustee. Both favoured the plan, and he consented.

Thus it came about that John, Charles, Vernon and Alfred, with a servant Pearce, embarked in the 'Warrior' on 9 October 1829, carrying with them goods and chattels which entitled them under the regulations then in force to a land grant of some 5,500 acres.

Their goal, the South-western corner of Australia, was a land very unlike either the green tropical islands of the West and East Indies, or the American mainlands, and only superficially similar to the recently settled Eastern coast of Australia. Its unlikeness to the Indies had repelled the spice-trading Dutch, who sought colonies of exploitation. The similarity of its eucalypt forests to those of New South Wales now led the English colonizers to expect a complete parallel with the eastern coasts of the new continent. The South-western corner, however, shut off by arid areas from the larger fertile area of Eastern and South-eastern Australia, is a land of surprising peculiarities. Hardly a species of plant found there, from grasses to forest trees, had been found elsewhere. Even its animals, with the exception of the native dog or dingo, were distinct from those of Europe, Asia and America, and though closely related to, yet distinguishable from those of Eastern Australia. The Aborigines, like those of the eastern areas, showed no trace of pastoral or agricultural knowledge. For two centuries Dutch navigators, though well acquainted with the coast-line, had considered the land utterly useless, merely another instance of the rule that western shores within or near the tropics were more arid than other aspects.

In the twenties of last century, however, British naval and military officers, agog with suspicion of French designs, joined with middle-class projectors and speculators, in urging the occupation of the Swan River by a free colony. They painted a picture of the land thereabouts very different from the gloomy Dutch portrait. Where others had reported sandy wastes and flyblown savages, Stirling told of abundant rainfall, sweet herbage, safe anchorages, fresh water at shallow depths everywhere, and a well-wooded interior.

Reading his reports, at a time when statesmen in England were harassed by stagnant trade, deficient harvests, a redundant and discontented population, it is small wonder that the projectors looked upon Western Australia with prophetic eyes as the promised land, where colonies free from servitude, would achieve instant prosperity upon 'the principles of sound policy, justice and science.'

Their hasty experiments and the subsequent recoil to convicts for the sake of cheap labour do not disprove the good opinions of Captain Stirling. The only show, once again, that a new society is a complex structure, slowly built from generation to generation, as men unravel the mysteries of the land by which it lives and is moulded.

South-western Australia, its people know now, is neither the barren waste of the early explorers' tales, nor the easy paradise of the projectors of '29. It enjoys a heavy and dependable rainfall, averaging over thirty inches annually from Perth to Albany, over forty on the Darling Range and below Geographe Bay, and even fifty at Cape Leeuwin and along the karri-covered south coast. This rain falls, however, mainly during the winter and spring, between May and November — a Mediterranean climate — and the dry summer and autumn are harsh weather for semi-tropical grasses. The agelong prevalence of dry seasons has stopped the accumulation of humus and the formation of rich soils, sive in moise valleys. The woody foliage has dried and been burnt, incessantly, by the black-fellows' fires, lit to drive the game. The skilled farmers amongst the early settlers soon noted the consequent prevalence of earths without humus, and the scattered occurrence of true soils. The humus necessary to profitable cultivation, in the days before scientific manuring, was to be found only on alluvial flats, in swamp lands and in pockets among the hills. To these the first settlers had perforce to scatter. Until the work of von Liebig and Bennett Lawes, making feasible the cheap supplementing of poor soils, had become widely known, close settlement by agriculturists was far less practicable than the rainfall figures suggested. It is unfair, therefore, to think of the pioneer settlers as ignorant of the land's powers because they settled it so sparsely. In the then state of agriculture the scattering was ordained by the soil.

Four types of country were early recognized, and distinguished primarily by the timber they carried.

I. Close to the west coast, from Fremantle to Geographe Bay, runs a narrow strip of open, rolling limestone country. This is dotted, in park-like fashion, with big tuart trees, and occasional brakes of 'peppermints', resembling willows. From the first, sweet grasses were found growing between the tuarts, a rare forest-floor in Western Australia, a land contrasted in this relative absence of grasses with naturally pastoral New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland. The widest and most inviting part of the 'open forest' is at its southern end, where it spreads around Geographe Bay, and is intersected by a number of small streams, such as the Sabina, the Abba and the Vasse.

II. Behind the limestone strip occurs a second type, the coastal sandplain stretching in a longer sweep of irregular width from near Geraldton to King George's Sound (Albany). This is hungry soil for the most part, carrying scrub forest of stunted jarrah and banksia. It is fit for cultivation with heavy manuring only where alluvial flats have been spread over the sandplain by streams from the Darling Range, or where, in chance depressions, peaty deposits have accumulated and enjoy during the dry summer a natural irrigation from higher strata.

III. The third belt, once covered with prime jarrah forest of magnificant hardwood, lies along and above the 'range' or edge of the plateau which forms the mass of Western Australia. Here the earth is a decomposed granite, capped over wide areas with laterite, either as a rocky 'cuirass', or as tumbled boulders or 'ironstone gravel'. Good soils, i.e. soils responding amply to cultivation without 'artificial manures', were found, however, in substantial areas and in small pockets, wherever epidiorite dykes had intruded into the granite, or a depth of alluvium from such dykes had collected in river valleys. The settlers, as their knowledge of the river grew, picked out these 'diorite soils' by the blackbutt and red-gum trees they carried, the combination being a sure sign of rich land.

IV. A fourth belt, mostly a stiff loam, occurs along the wet south coast, where a better distributed rainfall grows red-gums interspersed with karri, the giants of the Western forests, and occasional belts of pure karri, on less tenacious soil.

[See Map, facing page 16 for these belts of timber and soil.]

The close forests of jarrah, red-gum, blackbutt and karri proved insuperable obstacles to the first settlers, in haste for returns to their labours. Dwellers in Britain, which was slowly cleared for the plough by Romans, Saxons and Normans, hardly appreciate the cost in human muscular effort which the conversion of forest into arable represents, a cost comparable to the mighty labours and small gains of an interminable trench warfare. In Western Australia the long war between men and trees has hardly begun. The land is in the Roman era, speaking comparatively. The pioneers, in effect, were like raiders on the Saxon Shore, in haste to make good their footing by the capture of a clearing that would give them instant returns. They tried the jarrah and karri forest and, failing, were forced to seek out the open limestone lands, where the tuarts grew, or the coastal-alluvial areas, types I and II. This urgent need of immediate supplies, quite as much as the land regulations which Wakefield blamed, ad nauseum, explains the scattered holdings of the Swan River settlement. Even now, with artificial fertilizers and communal clearing, settlement of the jarrah and karri country types III and IV, 'on a face', i.e. in continuous areas, calls for scientific farming after heavy initial costs, partly irrecoverable. Those who know best the three barriers set by nature to the speedy conquest by European methods of the South-West corner, viz. patchy land, dry summer, and the big timber, will measure with tolerance the limited success the first attack achieved. The forlorn hope made good a footing against the timber and the marauding blacks, and hung on.