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TREVOR NEWTON WRITES:
Over the past fifteen years I have travelled hundreds of thousands of kilometres around rural and Outback Australia recording what I see in a series of illustrated travel journals. These now run to twelve volumes of text and around eight hundred sketches and drawings. My particular interest is in the architecture and the lifestyle of the small country town and on my travels I am always on the look-out for the interesting, the unusual and the characteristic - and trying in a light, spontaneous but essentially faithful way to convey them in pen, ink and watercolour. There is one Golden Rule about my drawing; any and every sketch has to be completed on the spot and not altered or tinkered with afterwards. I hope that this practice has resulted in the freshness and spontaneity I was aiming for. I hope, too, that my sketches convey something of my fondness for the little-known Australia that lies beyond the travel brochure clichés.
The following small selection of notes and sketches is taken from a diary kept during a three-month journey around New South Wales in January to April, 2002.
Anyone interested in publishing some of this material in book form can reach me via the ‘CONTACT US’ page. What you see here represents only a tiny proportion of the whole archive.
JUNEE (pop. 4,000)
Junee, January 26th 2002. Australia Day.
An appropriate day to start this journal - appropriate place, too; the perfect little Australian country town. I write this at a battered, red-painted wood and wrought iron table on the wide verandah of the Loftus Hotel on a flawlessly sunny but pleasantly breezy day. The white-painted Junee Hotel lies beyond the Sydney -Melbourne railway tracks (a jangling crossing bell has just started) behind a screen of palm trees. Hills and silos can be seen to the right and the cream and brown Victorian station with its tin mansard roof lies to the left. An Australian flag flutters from its pole in the little Railway Square. Arrived c.1.30 p.m. yesterday. A fine, calming, gentle bus journey from Canberra. We rolled through uniformly tawny, tree-dotted hills with mauve distances. Decent small towns - Yass, Harden (where wheat takes over from sheep) - and changed for the railway at Cootamundra. The train had a placard fixed to the front: “K. J. Smith’s Last Trip 1960-2002.”, it read. As the train pulled in, we were asked to give three cheers for the driver who was retiring; ending his last journey here at Junee where he lives. A reception committee gathered round the front car and flowers were given and photographs taken. Passengers - some of them grateful for a ‘smoko’, no doubt - gathered outside the doors to watch. I stepped across the square to the hotel – where the landlady greeted me at the door, holding my key ready. Mine was the only train of the day, so she knew when to expect me! Junee, 9.35 a.m. Sunday January 27th 2002. A flawless, pale blue sky again. The Australian flag and the long canvas shop blinds in the little square billow in the fresh breeze. The newsagent’s on the corner is quietly busy as people from out of town drive up in their ‘utes’ to collect the Sunday papers. At the other end of the verandah sits an old couple - in silence - looking toward the light like something out of an Edward Hopper painting. He clacks along the corridors on a pair of four-pronged aluminium sticks - to shave in the gents’ washroom or to watch cricket on the box; she sits or makes cups of coffee. They spend their days on the balcony and, I have discovered, live here. Another resident is a young bloke called Shane. He paces, quietly smoking, or sits, shirtless, looking vacant. Apart from these three, I am the only other person here. (Later) Up to the Monte Cristo homestead after breakfast - via the Catholic Church (near French, Joffre and Kitchener Streets). Caught the tail end of Mass and bent briefly over a pew at the back. Ceiling fans whirred; the congregation - fairly large - seemed listless and fidgetty; the heavily robed old priest mopped himself with a pocket handkerchief. At an outside stall - unattended - plastic rosary beads swayed in the gentle breeze. Monte Cristo enjoyable - in an odd way. A four-square, iron-laced, verandahed house - 1884 - set on a hill with a parched attempt at a formal garden around it. Outhouses full of dusty, shredded and broken old carriages and dogcarts. The owner, Reg Ryan, showed me around. Ruined and vandalised in 1963, the place has been fully done up and its clutter of mid-Victorian furniture gives the right oppressive feel - whatnots, chiffoniers, credenzas etc. - and a gruesome firescreen of whole, unprocessed hummingbirds pressed flat between two sheets of glass. In the main bedroom is a creepily heavy and ornate suite - dressing table, wardrobe etc. - made in Sheffield c.1860. “No matter where in the world you go, you won’t find a better set of bedroom furniture,” I was told. It was in this room that the original owner died, aged 69, in 1910; poisoned via a carbuncle on his neck by a tight starched collar (“or was it cholera?” a recent young visitor asked, apparently). His widow, who turned the box room into a memorial chapel and had the local R.C. priest come up the hill to say Mass, left the house only twice in the following twenty three years. “My wife’d give it about a week and she’d be off,” said Reg. Monte Cristo is supposed to be the most haunted house in Australia. No benign, semi-transparent old biddies in cameo brooches, though - the guidebook is full of tales of family pets found with gouged eyes and torn bellies in closed rooms, late 19th century loonies being chained for forty years in potting sheds, deaths by fire, babies being dropped down flights of stairs by demented housemaids etc., etc. CULCAIRN, 28th January ’02. Culcairn Hotel, 1891. Originally built to provide accommodation for people breaking the long Sydney to Melbourne rail journey. Very large and empty; grand but faded. Out of scale in this little township of 1100 people. Corridors are pink with brackets and arches outlined in white. Fine 1870’s rococo mirror on staircase wall. A little lightly curvaceous Edwardian furniture dotted about. Lofty, peeling bathrooms with original fittings. Rangy gardens at rear full of interesting Victorian clutter. Terra cotta urns, bent lead fountains etc., etc… The township is a small network of quiet old streets with single storey houses. Sleepy; leafy. School of Arts with War Memorial porch. Sweeping row of balustraded, urned shops on Railway Parade. Another shop in a back street is wonderfully frozen in time with a collapsing verandah, Bushells advertisements and perfect pepper trees framing it. The display in window could be c.1928. Across the railway track is a disused old baker’s shop with a highly elaborate Edwardian painted sign on the door, “Wheaten Bread a Speciality”. Later. Out into the glowing dusk. Quiet lives going on in night-time houses; children playing late. A boy on a bike wished me “G’day” in a friendly, spontaneous way. Violent buzzing and droning of crickets, cicadas etc, in every bush and shrub. Late-settling birds; a few magpies and argumentative gangs of kookaburras. Whirling snowstorm of winged insects in the floodlights of the little tennis club on the edge of town…
NARRANDERA (pop. 5,000), 3rd Feb. 2002 A pleasant, friendly place. Four or five fairly substantial old hotels - one v. grand World War I job near the defunct railway station, another with substantial Ionic columns supporting its balcony. ‘Tree-mendous Narrandera’, the publicity leaflet calls it - the streets being lined with rows of low, leafy plane trees. These, however, rather obscure the more interesting buildings. Elegant little National Bank, a well restored two storey terrace of shops (mid-1880’s), official buildings with confident Art Nouveau touches, a Royal Doulton fountain (one of only two in the world, mercifully) and a supermarket housed in a rambling Edwardian warehouse-cum-emporium with interior wooden pillars, staircases and pressed metal ceilings still intact. There is enough here to keep me busy for a couple of days… A Patriotic Altar Frontal in Saint Mel's Roman Catholic Church, Narrandera. THE OLD CEMETERY, NARRANDERA Friday, February 8th, ’02 A Cemetery Crawl in the late a.m. yesterday. Excellent. An interment was happening as I arrived. Hot sunshine, pacific clouds, a widely scattered crowd of c. 50 rather cheerful looking people in shirt sleeves or floral frocks. Around fifteen or so of them had umbrellas - held as parasols - some in light dove grey obviously supplied by the undertaker. The graveyard is divided into sections; Presbyterian, Catholic etc. Red, dusty earth on a little hilltop site; arid, stony, buckled. Richly carved stones with touching homemade verses (see below). Three or four drownings in the Murrumbidgee. A number of quaint misspellings, too - inattention or ignorance on the stonecutter’s part?
In Loving Memory of Our Dear Brother Frederick H. L. Burgess Who was drowned In the Murrumbidgee River While Bathing 7th March 1892, Aged 19 Years. “In the Midst of Life we are in Death” All you that stop to read my stone, Consider how soon I was gone Death came, did me no warning give Therefore be careful how you live.
and In Loving Memory of My dearly beloved Husband Joseph Alexander McKay Who was drowned in the Murrumbidgee On the 29th day of May 1890 Aged 31 years Leaving a sorrowing Wife and two Children. Loved by me, your affectionate Wife, And now to think that you Lie still and silent in this grave I can’t believe it’s true.
Travel Log, Narrandera - Temora, 9/2/02 The country is fertile, green, flat and much irrigated. Peach growing is the big thing here. Whitton (pop. 500) was an Australian archetype: a weed-grown, rusty railway track, silos, a tiny post office, a cluster of battered fibro houses, an elderly couple sitting on a verandah, a lock-up shop with peeling handpainted sign - G.A. Kelly, Family Butcher (the proprietor sitting in the darkened interior waved at me) - and a toothless character in a greasy Akubra hat leaning against the tailboard of a dilapidated ‘ute’…
TEMORA (pop. 4,600) 10/2/02 Very much to my taste, Temora. Rather Federation in appearance; most prominent buildings c.1900 with frequent touches of Art Nouveau. A main drag of side-by-side banks and a wacky Catholic church (with a splendid presbytery) in a strange mongrel blend of Tudor, Romanesque and Spanish Baroque - all in beautiful nick and waiting to be drawn… The first hotel I tried - the Temora - was full up because of ‘The Gift’, a local charity athletics event which brings everyone flooding into town. The second - the Royal (into which I booked) - is run by a cheery Balkan chap with a name (over the door) like a problem rack of Scrabble letters: VOJISLAV KRSTIC. There are rangy staircases and verandahs out back with a handful of darting kittens. The tin roof of my room has just started contracting as the day begins to cool - a ticking, tapping sound… (Later.) Went for a shower only to find this notice pinned up in the washroom: HOT WATER TAKES APPROX. FIVE MINUTES TO COME THROUGH TO THE SHOWER. SORRY FOR INCONVENIENCE - EVERYTHING IS SLOW IN THE COUNTRY.
After lunch I drew the old flour mill and railway station - these on the advice of three pleasant boys of about thirteen who had stopped and chatted (as many people do) as I was working this morning. Bright lads - not cynical or silly; yobbish or tongue-tied. They told me all about the impending excitements of ‘The Gift’ and then asked me what sort of buildings I liked drawing best. Rather dilapidated ones, I told them. “Oh, you’ll like the old flour mill, then,” said one, “lots of broken windows there!” “And the railway station,” said another, giving me directions to both slightly out-of-town places. They were right; the mill - 1907 - is in just the right state of dereliction; sagging clapboard, peeling paint, sash windows sunk in their frames - and the railway station presented an impressive sweep of deserted, sun-cracked platform. Only the occasional freight train passes through here these days. The driver of one waved to me as I sat drawing.
MAITLAND (pop., including surrounding area, 47,000) Saturday, February 24th, 2002 Almost uniquely among the many towns I have visited on this trip, Maitland has a winding, irregular (as opposed to rectilinear) street plan - its main artery following the line of an early 19th century stock route. This fact leads to a rambling, English feel - with nooks and crannies, surprises and oblique views across the rooftops of the town’s grand array of High Victorian buildings.
N.B. The English atmosphere was enhanced yesterday morning by the sight of a group of elderly ladies in impeccable whites enjoying a morning game of croquet in the shadow of the local parish church. Among the names on the church’s War Memorial lych-gate is one ‘W. G. Grace’.
The journey from Tamworth to Armidale took us higher into the beautiful New England ranges - rolling mountain country; boulder-strewn, horse- and cattle-dotted, thinly populated. Quiet ‘galvo’ homesteads - shacks, really - punctuate the grey-green landscape. Feels high, looks potentially cold and has an increasing calmness to it.
GLEN INNES. THE ANATOMY OF A COUNTRY TOWN.
Saturday, March 2nd 2002
A glorious journey from Armidale yesterday evening through the achingly beautiful New England tablelands. Glen Innes lies on top of the worn volcanic peaks of the Great Dividing Range. Mile after mile of blond, lawn-like undulating pasturelands, rocky outcrops, sweeping ranges, eagles, clumps and dots and rows of gum trees, firs and poplars – and at Ben Lomond (everything is Scottish here) a superb sweeping view to the north. And the clouds! Vast changing panoramas with the blinding sunshine casting whole areas into shadow while highlighting others. Wild shapes. Long shards of purplish cloud cutting through paler but bulkier masses. Silvery broccoli growing among frowning grey anvils. I can remember the sweep and drama but I can’t really put them into words… Glen Innes made up for the relative disappointment of Armidale. The Real Thing. One feels far away now. The one or two tiny settlements we passed through on the way here showed that population is now fairly thin and scattered. I arrived just before dusk. The town (pop. 6,200) consists of a long, rising and falling main street lit down the centre by glass globes on cast iron poles with grander clusters of Victorian lamps (one the Boer War Memorial) at the two main intersections. There is an unbroken sweep of Victorian and Edwardian shop and hotel facades and the view is punctuated by the wedding-cake tower of the French Renaissance / Italianate hybrid of a Town Hall.
I booked into Williams’s Club Hotel – the classic verandahed type (though here running round all four sides of the building). It has been run by three generations of the same family since it was built in 1906. A bun-haired lady in a cluttered office (with a solid old safe that has probably been there since the place opened) booked me in and gave me an excellent room. Two beds (“Use the double,” she said), fan, wash-basin, a framed picture of 19th century sheep-shearing and walls and ceiling lined with horizontal planks of pitch pine which give the place the feel of a ship’s cabin. My room is on the balcony, too, which is dotted with painted cast-iron tables and chairs and commands a fine view up and down the main street. I walked the empty side streets in the gathering dusk. A dog barked, crickets scraped and chirruped and a solitary cow lowed somewhere nearby - oh, and as I rounded a corner, a perfect full moon emerged from behind a bright bank of cloud… Next day, March 3rd. Glen Innes has calm - and charm; an unconscious charm and a feeling of continuity. Old-established shops - the chemist’s, 1900; this hotel, 1906; the rambling, four-pedimented Kwong Sing War’s department store, Est. 1886. A Mr Kwong still runs this fascinating emporium. Guitars, fishing rods, penknives, singlets, boots and felt hats are clumped fairly promiscuously in the window. Inside, there are old shop fittings; ornate ceiling roses and much pressed metal panelling. A row of old trade calendars in frames stands atop a cabinet. One is for 1916, “With the Compliments of Kwong Sing War, General Merchants”, and features flag-bedecked cartouches with the frowning (-it was to be a bad year for them-) chromolithographed faces of Kitchener, Jellicoe and Sir John French. The main drag fills with battered ‘utes’ in the mornings when people drive into town to shop. Real old ladies ( as remembered from childhood) with flowery frocks and wicker shopping baskets toddle along under the wide verandahs, and sunbrowned sheep- and cattle-men in greasy Akubra hats lean ‘yarning’ on the tailgates of their station wagons. Behind the High Street to the north is a chain of six or seven little parks each occupying a block: King Edward Park with its Memorial bandstand and Anzac Park with its long, long lists of bronze names set into the gates. Back on the main street one notices quaint touches; not twee, just un-modern. At the main intersection a sign reads “Please Cross with Courtesy” - something which the little old ladies do without needing to be asked, of course. This rather polite, old-fashioned tone was noticeable in the town’s tourist information folder in my hotel room. A chemist’s advertisement promises “Prompt Prescription Service. Delivery to all Hotels” and informs one that the shop supplies “Fossicking Requisites, Prospecting Tweesers (sic), Magnifying Glasses and Sample Vials.” Note: this is gemstone country; “fossicking” is mineral prospecting, a little of which still goes on. The Calendar of Annual Events announces the Agricultural Show, The April Picnic Races and, in September, the “Largest White-Faced Bull Sale in the Southern Hemisphere,” no less. And about the local museum we are informed that “of interest is a collection of twelve pewter sculptures depicting the characters of Colonial Australia.” This is a lovely town. Quiet, friendly and soothing to visit and with a feeling of solidity about it. As I finish writing this, the elderly barman who lives two rooms along the balcony from mine is whistling for his little Jack Russell terrier which seems to have the run of the whole hotel… MOREE (pop. 10000) As I walked through the quiet streets at a very brisk pace at c. The cemetery was very large but amazingly I found the grave in the first half dozen I looked at. The tomb next to it is of one Herbert John Greedy who died aged two in 1908. The words on the Dickens gravestone are as follows. The madly (mis-) punctuated doggerel verse is truly appalling:
In Memoriam ED. BULWER LYTTON DICKENS Late M.P. Wilcannia Husband of Youngest son of Charles Dickens And Catherine His Wife OBIT. MOREE 23rd JAN. 1902 Erected by Donald and Gordon.
Here lies the Resting Place of him Whose Lifes Light can never dim Quaint glimspes through an English mist Of his Fathers Creations, Oliver Twist, Mr Micawber, Barnaby Rudge and Others of the Famous List.
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