demonstrates vacuums

When he wants to frame his argument against British crowds then he goes to the wilderness in Canada to live in a cottage with a considerable library as if he were at home in the Lake District, and he does not live in burrow, or nest, or cliff-face palace or amazing velvet ball lined with mirrors, but in his normal home, a cottage, and let me imagine (though no proof) that he sees himself wearing his usual daily clothes in that setting, not a dress or a ruff, not an incredible shawl, but the same trousers he always wears, though maybe warmer: perhaps he mentally gives himself a coat.

… there are daily
reports of people overriding
the most exotic restraints
to become ordinary. The armless woman
uses her toes to make woodburn kittens.
The blind man demonstrates vacuums
and sells lots of them, as convinced
of lint as the next person. Shall I go on?

Kay Ryan, To Explain the Solitary from Elephant Rocks, 1996. Adam Lindsay Gordon was addicted to horse riding in the northern hemisphere and then he was the same way in the southern hemisphere when his father sent him to South Australia equipped with a letter of introduction to the mounted police; but then he became a published poet where he was not one before, so there was a difference to his life (the difference was the publishing since he had written poems privately, personally, previously), he made life easier for the compilers of Inspirational Quotes by inventing the lines, "Life is mostly froth and bubble | Two things stand like stone | Kindness in another's trouble | Courage in your own" for Ye Wearie Wayfarer His Ballad - in Eight Fyttes, 1867, and still he rode dangerously, falling off his horse onto his head; and continued to ride in steeplechases, a favourite sport of his from childhood onwards -- one school expelling him when he wagged class to compete in races and the law nearly locking him up at seventeen when he fetched back the impounded horse that he had rented for a race -- and steeplechasing had already been imported south by the time he got there, but racing was more dangerous in Australia, he said when he wrote an article about it for the Australasian in 1868, and not fruitfully dangerous, he asserted, just bang-about for no sane reason that he could see. “Steeplechasing is of course intended to be a dangerous pastime, but the sport is scarcely enhanced by making it as dangerous as it can be made.”

This much at least will scarcely be gainsaid, our horses (to say nothing of their riders) seldom last long at cross-country work. The continual hard raps on heavy redgum or stringy bark rails, coupled with the constant jarring shocks caused by landing on a soil baked by an Australian sun, is enough to cripple the strongest knees and wear out the toughest sinews in a very few seasons.

The range of weights should be changed, he says, and the races should be shifted to a different time of year to ensure that the earth is soft. (I am finding all of this in Henry Kendall's 1892 Lindsay Gordon memoir.) The normalcy of the season needs to yield to the normalcy of malleable ground, and then – what? – gentlemen can join. “I think we should get a better and more respectable class of riders, for there are gentlemen here that would ride their own horses if they could.” You are allowed to feel that he has carried over with him, in his molten impressions, a form of society that will allow the words “gentleman,” “better,” “respectable,” “own,” to function as an argument. The gods on Olympus are unoriginally emotional but they transform into gold and can fly. Last weekend I watched an East Coast artist who was installing his work in Las Vegas put a multicoloured sculpture in front of a patterned wall and wonder if the look was “too Circus Circus,” a critique that everybody around him understood.

breaking away into the wide world

“[W]e have been homesick practically all the time.” Thirty years homesick: why is she here, Ada Cambridge? Richer, she would have gone home. De Quincey doesn’t imagine that his other self in Canada is homesick; it is difficult to picture when you are not in it; being like the true temperature of snow. “Doubtless, if we had settled in an English parish, we should have bewailed our narrow lot,” Cambridge writes, “should have had everlasting regrets for missing the chance of breaking away into the wide world.” You can’t believe it, reading the rest of this chapter. Writing doubtless, she means, I doubt. Now she remembers the place where she would have lived with her clergyman if they had stayed, a “beflowered house,” “a tiny hamlet of a parish […] that haven of dignified peace and ease.” “[M]an is content with his lot; harmony is achieved,” says Virginia Woolf while she is describing the life of the Rev. James Woodforde of Weston Longueville in her Two Parsons essay, from The Common Reader: Second Series, 1935.

Surely, surely, then, here is one of the breathing-spaces in human affairs — here in Norfolk at the end of the eighteenth century at the Parsonage. For once man is content with his lot; harmony is achieved; his house fits him; a tree is a tree; a chair is a chair; each knows its office and fulfils it. Looking through the eyes of Parson Woodforde, the different lives of men seem orderly and settled. Far away guns roar; a King falls; but the sound is not loud enough to scare the rooks here in Norfolk. The proportions of things are different. The Continent is so distant that it looks a mere blur; America scarcely exists; Australia is unknown. But a magnifying glass is laid upon the fields of Norfolk. Every blade of grass is visible there. We see every lane and every field; the ruts on the roads and the peasants’ faces.

“[O]ur parishioners dropped curtseys to us on the road,” recalls Cambridge, ”and” – not straight-faced – or straight and not at the same time – “felt honoured beyond measure when we went to see them.” In de Quincey, “Profound solitude cannot now be had in any part of Great Britain […] in England it is possible to forget that we live amongst greater agencies than those of men and human institutions. Man, in fact, ‘too much man,’ as Timon complained most reasonably in Athens, was then, and is now, our greatest grievance in England. Man is a weed everywhere too rank. A strange place must that be with us from which the sight of a hundred men is not before us, or the sound of a thousand about us.” His islands are noisy with humans, but the birds in Australia are either quiet or crying out inhumanly, if songs can be taken as, in some way, human.

They are rhymes rudely strung with intent less
Of sound than of words,
In lands where bright blossoms are scentless,
And songless bright birds;
Where, with fire and fierce drought on her tresses,
Insatiable Summer oppresses
Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses,
And faint flocks and herds.

That poem is the source of the songless birds and scentless flowers in the first chapter of Cambridge's book. It is A Dedication: to the Author of ‘Holmby House’,* by Adam Lindsay Gordon, whose marble bust is in Westminster Abbey and whose old cottage features an extensive variety of local craft work of the highest quality in the Ballarat Botanical Gardens near Lake Wendouree. If The Boscombe Valley Mystery was published in 1891 and Gordon died in 1870, then it is possible that he lived in Ballarat at the same time as the murderer Black Jack. “His only daughter died while he was in Ballarat and although a daredevil on a horse and an accomplished rider he led a tragic life. His poetry with its rolling rhythm survives him,” states the webpage for the Adam Lindsay Gordon Cottage at visitvictoria.com. In 1889 Banjo Paterson wrote a patriotic poem against Gordon’s birds and flowers.

"A land where dull Despair is king
O'er scentless flower and songless bird!"
But we have heard the bell-birds ring
Their silver bells at eventide,
Like fairies on the mountain side,
The sweetest note man ever heard.

Song of the Future. See also, CJ Dennis, The Golden Whistler, 1933. “Literary nationalists have always been indignant with Adam Lindsay Gordon for referring, inaccurately, to Australia’s ‘bright birds’ as songless:” Roger Covell, Australia’s Music, 1967. The Cambridges migrated in the same year that A Dedication was published, in Gordon’s book Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes, which was also the year of his death, at the age of thirty-seven, on the day after publication, when he went away privately with a gun and killed himself in a grove of bayside tea-trees. “At last, one morning in December 1839, the Rector took his gun, walked into the beech wood near his home, and shot himself dead,” Woolf wrote in Two Parsons. The parson in that sentence of course is not Woodforde. Whenever I think of that essay I remember the words, “and shot himself.” Ada Cambridge sailed overseas in April; Bush Ballads was printed on the 23rd of June (and A Dedication had not been printed before, because it was the actual dedication page of the book) meaning that Cambridge did not come to Australia believing that the birds would not be able to sing, even though the first chapter of Thirty Years in Australia leads you to believe that she did. Her corrective statement, “none of which, actually, is the rule,” is not a record of a discovery, it is a mode of alignment with pro-Australian literary forces.





*Holmby House: a Tale of Old Northamptonshire, 1860, was written by G. J. Whyte-Melville, 1821-1878. One of Gordon's favourite writers, according to Henry Kendall's A Memoir of the Life of Adam Lindsay Gordon: the Laureate of the Centaurs, 1892. When Gordon mailed Whyte-Melville a copy of his book Sea Spray and Smoke Drift, 1867, the other man sent a letter to say that if he rode as well as he wrote then he would "put him up in any steeplechase for which I had a likely winner."