Cattle Chosen/Chapter 4

by Edward Shann

IV

CONCERNING CHARACTER

At the ebb tide of their fortunes little remained to the Bussells but land and tenacity of purpose. And the land on the Blackwood had now twice beaten them. John, however, proved himself a sane judge in his choice of the Vasse plains as the scene of a third venture, and at his call brothers and sisters rose gamely to a fresh effort. Their individual characters, diverse in many ways, brought to the joint task the common element of grit.

Charles, intellectually John's alter ego, and in imagination perhaps his superior, lacked the leader's initiative. In the details that make a pioneering life, he leant upon John. Take as example a message he sent from 'The Adelphi' to Augusta in 1832.

'My dear John, — We greatly miss your pair of hands. Both the saws are at present useless, and the axe requires a handle. A sail needle is much wanted. Perhaps you could get one from Mrs. Molloy.^[1] Alfred has lost the key of the blue chest. Pearce has broken the vice. Probably you could contrive to come up by some means and return with me at the end of the week.'

Four years later, when John was preparing to embark for England to bring out his bride, the general leaning upon him drew this expression from Fanny, writing to Capel Carter:

'I will try to hope for what is right, that my beloved John will be enabled soon to return to England, but we can ill spare him. He is the mainspring of the whole machinery, and I scarcely know how we shall continue in motion without him. Yet is he impatient to be off, and when I think how much depends on his voyage, I too am impatient to send him away. But I am grown a sad coward. My heart sinks at the idea of separation, and even the hope of his bringing with him an affectionate and amiable wife in our dear Sophia does not always sustain me. My little mother feels the same, but we throw no impediment in his way beyond those of necessity.'

John owed nothing of this ascendancy to his stature. Save Charles, who stood five feet ten, the Bussells were all short men, John being but five feet six in height. Brown-haired and blue-eyed, his easy and pleasant voice commanded respect and spread confidence. Age did not rob him of an intrepid spring in his step. A quiet humour, coming so easily as to win greater effect by surprise, served as foil to his evident tenacity.

In his description of himself as 'the colonist, stalking through the woods', written to Sophie Hayward exactly a year before the fire at 'The Adelphi', which he had just left (see Appendix, Item I, p. 155), the Byronic self-consciousness is a little too heavy for modern liking, perhaps. Be it so. The determination to go out into a strange land, to rely on himself, and never to complain, however stiff the task, meant everything. ' 'Tis cheap and easy to destroy. But to help the young soul, add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame to redeem defeat by new thought, but firm action, that is not easy, that is the work of divine men.' (R. W. Emerson.) John Bussell, it is plain, drew some spark of that divinity from his home and college. On the shelves of the farmhouse he builded there still stand, as witnesses, his well-used, well-loved books. Homer, Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Xenophon, Horace, Quintilian, Lucretius, Juvenal, Plutarch's Lives, Mitford's History of Greece, Hooke's Roman History, Rollin's Ancient History are all there, and with them Malone's Shakespeare, Scott, both the novels and the poems, Byron, Gray, Wordsworth, Noble's Memoirs of Cromwell, Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, Hume's History of England, and Smollett's, Bunyan's Holy War. Gibbon's Decline and Fall he borrowed from Dr. Collie, and Dickens's novels as they appeared from Colonel Molloy or Eliot of Leschenault. Dibden's Sermons from Eminent Divines shows marks of much wear, as do also the small volumes of The Spectator. Here were sources from which he drew courage and power. Nor did he neglect them. The quotations he bandies with Wells, his college chum, and with the Bishop of South Australia are drawn from Aeschylus and Tacitus. The skinning of his first kangaroo provokes a long citation from the Georgics. The habit may be selfconscious to a degree now distasteful, but by such tics the Oxford scholar reminded himself of a great tradition that was still his, and the more potent because his, in common with men of high calling here and there on the round world, rari nantes in gurgite vasto, but not dismayed.

Once or twice his sisters give way to a shudder at the breaking down of old standards by colonial hardship. 'The poor gentry in this place, Capel, are reduced to work on the roads for support, whilst many of the affluent farmers seem rolling in plenty, so various has been their success.' So writes Mary Bussell to Capel Carter, from Swan River in August '34. Bessie, at Augusta in the same year, notes wistfully that cockatoo feathers which she would make into a broom, would serve as 'tasty drawing room decorations, in your land of elegance and ingenuity.' Bessie, too, scribbles a pencil note on the foot of a letter by Fanny to Capel in May '34, de profundis. 'Let my shoes be made high over the instep. It is so very dusty here in the summer that it is hardly possible to cross from one house to the other without getting dirty for the day, and at Perth it is worse. And the fleas!! Oh, my dear Capel, if you did but know you would wonder there is any of us left.' All complaining, however, was anathema, and the memory of this pardonable lapse tortured Bessie until she was driven to recant: 'I wish I could recall a few lines I added in haste' — to a letter of Fanny's. 'Pray do not any of you dwell on them. It was very silly. I must try and think of them no more!!' Wistfully, too, both Fanny and Bessie think of the things lost, so near their destination, with the wrecked 'Cumberland'.

'Mamma cannot manage to forget it at all, but when I think of the escape Mamma had in not coming down in her — as she intended, had not Sir James Stirling stopped her — all regrets almost vanish. Then there is poor Mrs. McDermott left to mourn her husband, expecting daily to be confined with her second child, without a farthing to support them. With this much worse case before us, we have not permitted ourselves to bewail our loss... But I must own when I look round and remember the things Fanny and I used to calculate on beautifying our little cottage I cannot but feel disappointed, and when they enumerate the number of things sent out to us, I do wish so much we could have had the unpacking of them.' — Bessie B. to Capel Carter, December 1834. Fanny, on the same sad topic: 'All Polly's (Mary's) vanities, dresses, bonnets, etc., etc., have met with a watery grave. Ours were burnt. So you see, Tippoo, the destinies decree that we shall not be the vain family you used to consider us.'

At times the transplanted manners of a pre-Reform drawing-room sound strangely from the aboriginal bush. In circumlocution they outdo the Pickwick Club. Fanny does not decide to pull an aching tooth. ' I shall not rest', she tells Capel, 'until my rebellious ivory is punished for its refractoriness by external banishment from its parent jaw.' [To Capel Carter, 21st October, 1834.] Where their sisters of a century later 'get the breeze up' the Misses Bussell would 'agonize'. Thus Fanny 'agonizes' about a letter entrusted to one who turns out to bear a 'character of the doubtful order', while Bessie wonders, 'How calmly we now take receiving visitors with little or nothing to set before them but salt pork. At first we used to agonize about it, but now we find people so well pleased to escape the rolling of a ship that they can enjoy anything.'

As strong Tories, they interpreted their faith in Church and State as requiring that they should make the best of everything, except Whiggery. 'Let us think how much worse it might have been, and thank God it is as it is. No doubt it is all for the best, as all our losses since we have been out have proved to be.' — Bessie B. to Capel, December '34.

This repression of repining on all subjects but one made it hot, however, for the Whig dogs. From quiet Winchester, Mrs. Bussell had written during the Reform Bill election: 'I do not like the Whigs. The present ministry are doing as all former of the sort have done, turning the country upside down. If we do not have a revolution I shall wonder.' When Whig ministers pruned expenditure on the new colony, however, dislike warmed into denuuciation. 'The present administration' — the mother is defending her cubs — 'is conducted in a heartless and mean manner.... The withdrawal of the 'Sulphur' has filled me with dismay. I cannot see '— from Winchester, mark you — 'how the colonial schooner can possibly supply the necessities of the numerous and dispersed settlements. I can only picture my last detachment to Augusta enduring with less bodily strength to overcome difficulty, all the privation and hardship endured by my precious sons. Providence certainly miraculously sustained them in the wilderness. To Him I pray for a merciful dispensation of such trials, and of fortitude in them.'. — Mrs. F. L. Bussell to the party at Augusta, 31st December 1832. Recurring in the same letter to the Whig Ministry's economies, she breaks forth: 'But what can you expect from Gully the boxer, Cobbett, Hunt, etc., etc., elected by King People, alias the scum of the earth, whom the Radicals, now that they have gained their ends and made fair England Revolutionary, denomenate destructive! Reform in the Church is to be next settled. Alas! alas ! Our city has returned Mildmay and Baring.^[2] Mr. Fleming is ousted because he did not vote for Reform. There is certainly nothing to wish to stay in England for. Bessie! Ben is a Rat!!!'

Charles Bussell, writing to John of some punitive measure taken against the natives, reveals a Tory spirit as faithful, though quieter: 'It did not meet with the entire approbation of the Government, but it was not the less well done on that account.' Such hardihood in calling authority in question evidently shocked the writer himself, for he adds: 'This is almost the first Whiggish notion to which I ever gave birth.'

Tory principles, however, at no time deterred any of the family from lending a hand in every task that arose. 'I often think, dear Tip', wrote even Mary Bussell to Capel Carter on Christmas Eve 1835, 'of the horror you always had of us becoming laundresses, when the possibility of our being without a female servant came into your head. Then I look with what ease we get through our office.' Bessie had just before ridden over from Augusta to help the pioneer party at the Vasse. 'She is indeed an admirable girl and equal to anything. We hear from the boys that she is working wonders, reducing our savage brothers into some kind of order. I wish we could all have arrived there together. I should have liked to have borne the heat and burden of the day — selfishly perhaps, for I should have liked to have felt that their growing comforts arose from all, not one' — the kind of selfishness that makes good colonists. 'Bessie says your shirting and the working materials arrived in the very nick of time, for all their things were almost past repair. She put on a piece of any kind or colour by way of mending so that in their working costumes her Vasse boys are more like harlequins than anything else.' (See Appendix for Bessie's Journal of the ride over.) A series of character sketches of 'our five remaining treasures' was drawn from Fanny Bussell's ever-flowing pen by the news of William's death in England, which reached Augusta in June '35. 'John is a great solace to Mamma, who seems to depend upon him almost as she did on Papa in every affliction or trouble. He is looking well but harassed and distressed. This recent news from England was a severe blow to him, for he loved William dearly. Lenox ' — then at the Vasse — 'has written to me once since our last accounts from England. I wrote to apprise him of it, for I dreaded the shock upon so sensitive a mind. I wish you could see him now; he has grown so good and industrious and ingenious. His brothers all understand him, and pronounce "The Admiral" an admirable old fellow.

'Vernon and Alfred, both so young when you parted from them, would interest you equally, though in different ways. The former, steady, persevering and prompt in all his undertakings, of principles of the strictest honour, and in his own family so tender, so affectionate, so buoyant in spirits. His whole soul is in the success of the farm. Unlike the Bussells in general, activity to him is not an act of duty, but of inclination. His industry and promptitude render him one of the main props of the family. In person he is scarcely at all altered except that he has added a pair of whiskers of very respectable dimensions, and an imperial which Mr. Green tells him is worth a hundred a year to him at least. He is the same height as John, but more stoutly made, and with remarkably broad shoulders.

'Alfred's character is still unformed, remarkably so for his years, I think, but minds do not develop in this secluded region so rapidly as in the great world, where everything combines to call forth the passions and indurate the feelings. I often think of Alfred with much anxiety. He has many dangerous talents, a strong predilection for social life, a taste for its refinements, and at times a yearning for its pleasures. But he is a dear good fellow, and when time and religion have modified the sudden impulses of youth and taught him that harsh lesson that "all is not gold that glitters", he will cease to seek for happiness where it is not to be found. His temper is in wonderful subjection, and his fear of wounding the feelings of others almost amounts to a foible.

'I have not mentioned Charley. He is writing to you himself, and his letters are a complete index of his most beautiful mind.' — Fanny B. to Capel Carter, 4 June 1835.

The Lady Mamma, as the black servants called Mrs. F. L. Bussell, in her first letter home from Perth, expresses indignation that, with 'the church exactly what Fanny described, and Mr. and Miss Wittenoom excellent worthy creatures, they have opened a conventicle here.' Her letters are none the less vivid by reason of their old-world flavour. The following breathless story of a matron's trials and fortitude was dashed off at Augusta, on 1st February 1835, in the very crisis of preparing dinner for the Governor and his suite, on a surprise visit:

'A few lines to my most dear girl, to acknowledge all the thirteen packages by the "Adam", all in perfect order. Most thankful are we. The "Ellen" schooner is in, and has brought so many visitors and so much business that we are half beside ourselves, but we are all well and happy. The Governor dines with us to-day, and sails this even. A parcel [of letters] which will go in Mr. Turner's box will tell you much. We shall appear the victims of misfortune and ill-luck, but it is not so. Are we not blessed with health, spirits and content? The wreck of all our property you will have heard, but we will soon have another opportunity. My dear, we have no servant. Think of our difficulties, but do not pity us. The wreck has been found and plundered. Seven men have been transported, but very little property recovered, nothing valuable except my feather beds and a few blankets. You must not grieve for us. We have ceased to do so long since. Oh, my Capel! how your feelings have been harrowed! Your dear, dear letters are rich cordials. Continue to write such. The bonnets were most acceptable. We have sent Vernon's papers, and by this shall send duplicates. Our cow ran away again but returned with the heifer. Conceive our joy. I think affairs are taking a prosperous turn. We only want you and some others to feel no wish or want. I snatch this from my company to which I must return. God for ever bless and reward my Capel and all my benefactors, relations, friends. The caps were most à propos. Mr. Mackie^[3] wants a description of some of our property. He expects to convict more. The iniquity of the thing beggars description. God forgive them. Emma has taken her departure from my service. She is the most abandoned creature. She has violated every commandment. But I did not send her away; she would go. I hear poor Attwood^[4] is not flourishing at the Sound. The person who deluded him away from my service has forsaken him. Adieu, my own. I am yours for ever. Do not be troubled about us, a more happy, cheerful group cannot be found. F. L. Bussell.'

1. This letter was sent by John to his mother in England, as a 'specimen of Australian correspondence', and as a mild rebuke of her habit of sending models of 'European correspondence'. He added 'Mrs. Molloy has heard that I am sending a specimen of Australian correspondence, and sends me three notes which gallantry obliges me to copy; they are from Captain Molloy to her, written from our house, Augusta. Time, dinner.

   1. '"My dear,

   "They wish me to drink out of an old black ugly tin pot! Send me the brown jug with the silver rim. J. M."

   2. '"My dear,

   "Send me some pepper. J. Molloy, Captain."

   3. '"My dear,

   "Send us a tea-kettle. We have nothing but a frying-pan. J. M."'

2. Winchester. John Fleming of Stoneham Park, sat for Southampton County in the Parliaments elected in 1820, 1826 and 1830.
3. The Judge-Advocate, or senior magistrate.
4. An indentured servant who came out with Mrs. Bussell and Mary, but left them on their arrival.