I play the Violin at Fashionable Concerts, etc.—Ship before the Mast for Sydney—Go Up Country—Sheep-shearing—The Shearers’ good Resolutions and the Fall

I never knew what to make of Guest; he certainly believed all that he told me. He eventually came to my lodging and lived in the next room; he had an old duck, I think he said it was eighteen years old; he carried it about much the same as folks do a pet poodle. I never saw such a wise and affectionate thing as that duck was. By his bed in a large collar-box it would sit the whole night long and follow him and me about the room like a kitten. How he got it and why he was so fond of it was a mystery to me; he was the last man in the world one would have thought to have a pet duck and put up with the nuisance of it, but he had the duck right enough, and when we sat having our meals together it would push its beak under our arms and steal the dainty bits off our plates. That was nuisance enough, but the smell of it was outrageous and I very seldom had luncheon with Guest afterwards, but had most of my meals in a restaurant hard by.

I was still engaged at playing the fiddle at the dancing hall, and now and again I accepted engagements to go out to balls, etc., among the “Élite” of San Francisco. It was at the palatial residence of a ’Frisco nabob out at Menbo Park that I played my first public solo. I was terribly nervous. The solo I played was Rode’s “Air in G,” and I gave as an encore the “Cavatina” by Raff. Guest was there that night; I had managed to get him a ticket and borrowed a decent suit for him. I was sorry after that I had invited him. He got drinking too much, and though I had warned him to behave himself he shouted at the top of his voice as soon as I had finished my solo, “Good old Middleton! Give us another.” I turned hot all over and the perspiration whisked off my brow as I bowed to the applause of the audience and the pretty girl at the piano gazed up into my face and quickly placed the music of the “Cavatina” on the pianoforte and I was glad to start off playing again. I made several mistakes but I don’t think anyone noticed them; my name on the programme was not Middleton but Signor Marrionette! and everyone, of course, had great faith in the playing of a gentleman with that name.

Through my musical ability and enterprise I saw a good deal of ’Frisco “high life,” and after a deal of experience I came to the conclusion that low life was only the crude essence of high life. One set wiped their noses with a silk pocket handkerchief and the other with the thumb and forefinger, but both acted under the same impulse. The real curse of those early engagements was that after I had played the ladies would circle round me, quizz me up and down, old and young plying me with questions, telling me how they would love to spend their lives listening to delicious strains of music; they thought I was a soft sentimental poetical youth, green to the ways of life, and little dreamed that I had seen them all, so to speak, dancing in the South Seas with nothing on!

I was very homesick about that time and as Guest had made up his mind to go to Alaska I made up my mind to get out of ’Frisco and home to England. I threw my job up and not having enough money to pay my fare home I set about trying to get a berth on a ship. I will not weary you with my disappointments, but I eventually after many hardships got a job as deck-hand on the Alameda bound for Sydney. I had made up my mind to get to Sydney first and then get a berth on a ship that went by the Suez Canal route. After a rotten trip across tropic seas, working like a nigger, and sleeping in quarters that would have made the ’Frisco Chinamen sniff with disgust, I arrived at Woolloomoolloo Bay, was paid off and wandered about for several days.

I could not discover any of my old acquaintances that I would like to have seen. The Lubeck was in dock, but though I tried all I could to see if William my friend had returned, I could get no information. There were hundreds of English fellows trying to work their passages back to England and every week the deep-sea boats came through Sydney Heads with hundreds of passengers on deck gazing with admiring eyes at the beautiful scrub-covered hills of Sydney Harbour, their hearts beating happily as the relatives and friends waved their hands on the wharf. I often stood and watched the sisters, brothers, and lovers meet, and as the ships left the wharf for England once more I stood and watched the farewell hands waving as the great P. & O. or Orient liners sailed away, taking the hearts of the pinched white-faced, ragged brigade with her.

Failing to get a berth or a job at violin-playing, I availed myself of an opportunity offered me to go up country sheep-shearing. The new friends I had fallen in with told me that I could earn a splendid wage at the job, and though I knew nothing about the work, I believed them and went off.

We went a hundred miles by rail and tramped the rest, and when I eventually reached the sheep-station I had no boots to my feet, and my trouser legs were torn away through tramping through stiff scrub. I never had such a rough job in my life as on that sheep-shearing station. Hundreds of men arrived day after day from different parts of New South Wales, and clamoured for work. They were men of all degrees, swagsmen of long experience, and men of no experience, new chums and old chums. I got in just in time to get a job as a “rouse-about,” and then became a “penner-up.”

Many of us slept in camp tents and I made a good bit of money by fiddle-playing. I extemporised a small orchestra, which consisted of a concertina, two banjos and a bone clapper, and when the work was done we would sit under the blue gums and, as the sun twinkled on the skyline and disappeared, start the concert, and never did I have such an appreciative audience as they stood, those rough unshaved men leaning against the trees or sitting on stumps smoking and listening to the melodies that took their hearts back to the homeland, and as we played away and the marsh frogs croaked they would join in the chorus of some old song and put their whole soul in it. “Play that again, matey,” they would say as some strain touched them and awoke memories of long ago. I’ve often seen the tears in the eyes of those men, and I liked them; some of them were old enough to be my father. They were mostly men of a sentimental turn of mind and good men, as far as their intentions went, but they all found it so hard to make their actions harmonise with their intentions. They work hard when they do work, and after the shearing season go off with a big cheque and a firm resolve to start a little business or go back across the seas to see the old faces again.

With their billy-can swinging in their hand and their swag on their back they start across the bush, outbound to the new life of quiet and sweetness, and then the dreadful fall comes. Hot and tired they all stumble across the grog shanty in the bush town, outside of its wooden door they drop their swags to the ground, gaze in each other’s eyes with that querying look that says in silent language, “Well, I don’t think just one drink would hurt us,” and then each one carefully looks at the other, as though to say, “Mind, Bill, only one this time,” for they have all been through the same old fiasco before, made the same good resolutions and alas, then do as they will always do, for that one drink resolves into two. Each one looks once more at the other and each one relents and grants his comrade one more drink. “Yes, Bill, but mind you that’s the last,” and then one poking his head out of the grog shanty sees the sun setting and remarks to the others, “It’s getting late, chums; we’d better camp here for the night.” They all agree, and again all agree that another drink could not possibly hurt any of them. By that time they are getting half-seas over with the extra drinks in between which they each swallowed while the other wasn’t looking! Then the loud songs commence, and the yarns of past brave deeds, and the grog seller rubs his hands, delighted to see them getting affectionate one with the other as each finds his appreciative listener. By this time their voices can be heard at the township homesteads two miles over the hills, and the folk come from far and near to hear the songs, and to see the drunken spree of the homebound shearers. Already the dance has commenced, and the banjo is going full speed, “pink-a-tee-pink,” and then a space is cleared for the grand fight over the awful insult to the man from Stony Creek who has been doubted when he said he knew where gold could be found by the ton, and he found it but it was so heavy that he couldn’t carry it into town.

By midnight all the money is nearly spent, and on the slopes by the grog shanty most of them are sprawling fast asleep, the more excitable ones lifting their hatless heads up now and again, gurgling out some spasmodic strain of the last drunken song which they were singing just before they fell down.

At daybreak they are standing outside of the grog seller’s door kicking it with their boots, their mouths fevered and parched by the awful poison which they drank the night before, and so the great resolution ends once more. With their billy-cans and swags they depart across the bush on their several ways sad men on the “Wallaby track” homeless and penniless. And so they go on till they die, and I can well tell you all this because I was with those men, heard the good resolutions, saw the tears rise in their fearless eyes as they spoke with emotion of the happy-to-be future, and then witnessed their fall. With four of them I tramped away across the bush solitudes to look for work in a world of stern reality, for wherever you go in this world you will find that you cannot live on dreams.