Darwin at Weatherboard - the Stories Behind the Story

Charles Darwin, part way through his five year voyage on the HMS Beagle, arrived in Sydney only 48 years after the First Fleet.  Within a few days of his arrival, he was riding westwards to the new inland city of Bathurst, stopping around midday at an inn called Weatherboard.

It was located not far from my home, on the banks of Jamison Creek, and the area is now Wentworth Falls.  Darwin detoured to see the already famous falls, and wrote much in his journal about the remarkable landscape through which he was travelling.

To commemorate the 200th anniversary of his birth, Cambridge University Press published an anniversary edition of Charles Darwin in Australia.  It is a fascinating work, containing many facsimile exerpts of entries in his notebooks and journals, as well as drawings by such famous artists as Conrad Martens - a former shipmate of Darwin who had taken up residence in the colony of New South Wales.

Darwin's visit predates the existence of such technology as cameras, so the illustrations in the book are taken from paintings and drawings by artists such as Martens.  Other artists are drawn upon to provide images of the scenery Darwin saw, as well as the plants and animals.  One who is mentioned in the book is "the famous artist, John Gould" - another acquaintance of Darwin.

Yet, according to SLNSW Curator Margot Riley, Sydney Morning Herald, 2017-12-27, most of the illustrations in Gould's Birds of Australia were done by his wife, Elizabeth.  Riley states that "Gould was not an artist" and that Elizabeth Gould's "exquisite work became almost totally eclipsed by the fame of her husband" - John designed the plates for his book, and carefully supervised their production, but the artwork was hers.

Elizabeth did the 84 plates while raising six children, and when she died, John Gould employed a number of artists and illustrators to fill her role in the production of his books.  It seems somehow sad that brilliant artists like Elizabeth were so often consigned by cultural mores of their times to walk in the shadows.

Goodbye Girlie

If you have in your family people over the age of 80 years, and wonder what planet they were born on, then I can recommend this book as a window to their world, and as a way to understand where the Australia you are living in now came from.  The world we occupy is very different from their world, and this book - written by a woman who was born less than a century ago - not only shows you that world, but shows you why so much of our world is as it is.

Patsy Adam-Smith's Goodbye Girlie is a wonderful memoir - the sequel to her memories of childhood that were published in Hear the Train Blow.

It is too easy for people to paint a picture of a golden age in Australia's past - an age that really only shone for people in the upper levels of society.  The minority who lived well before and between the world wars were some of the men, and a handful of women - for the rest, life was somewhere between tough and abyssmal.  Patsy enlisted as a nurse's aid and did so to escape the boredom, poverty, and repression - social, economic, and religious - that was the life of a woman in so much of Australia.  Many other women did so for the same reasons, and more than a few of the men who enlisted also saw a brighter future for themselves if they could get into uniform and out of the grinding life allowed to "the lower classes" - if you are over 60 then you grew up listening to and interacting with older relatives who had lived that sort of life. If you are under 30, these books are an opportunity to hear stories that are otherwise being forgotten, and lost to posterity.

Such harsh conditions still exist in pockets of Australia, even today - and as for the wider world, well, I am truly glad that Australia is where I live.  Perfect we are not, but when you let Patsy's stories wash over you, you understand just how fortunate a country we are.  When you have time to sit and read for a few hours, I can recommend any of her books, just as I can recommend Ion Idriess, for anyone wanting to understand those times that were not really so long ago.