Creeping into Wilsons Promontory at first light felt like salvation. The aptly named Refuge Cove, in the midst of one of Victoria’s oldest national parks, was silent apart from the flickering trill of birds drifting across the bay. Pristine vegetation spilled down the rocky boulders over pale beaches and glass-green waters. It was breathtakingly serene.
I sat alone on white sand as a family of superb fairy wrens in glorious plumage skipped around my feet, tails flicking and gentle songs trickling through the air as if overflowing from a cup. They hopped beneath my drawn-up knees, entirely unconcerned by my presence. I felt like the first person on earth, in an untouched paradise, in some kind of natural harmony. Or at least a place that people had not yet messed up. I caught a glimpse of something we call ‘wilderness’.
‘The country consists of hills and gullies, gentle rises or hollows covered with heath and other wild flowers, one of the most abundant being our beautiful red correa,’ Edith described Wilsons Promontory on a later camping trip. ‘There are rocky coasts, delightful sandy bays, or quiet islands where many sea birds find resting places; and there are sedge-covered swamps or tea-tree fringed river flats.’
But such beauty is only apparent close to hand, not from a distance. Perhaps on her first sighting of the Victorian coast in 1887, such treasures would remain a part of the unknown promise of a new land. Perhaps, instead, Edith’s only expectations of Australia were formed by Charles Lamb’s caricature of Australian life, with pickpocketing kangaroos and convict stains. Or, like Ada Cambridge, did she arrive with a fearful expectation of ‘cannibal blacks and convict bushrangers . . . scentless flowers, the songless birds, the cherries with their stones outside’?
But this does not sound like the confident, assured woman Edith would grow into. I ask a friend, Grace Moore, who is a scholar of Victorian literature and its transposition into the Australian landscape.
‘Someone who read a lot of Dickens is likely to have expected a fairly lush, welcoming landscape,’ Grace suggests.
Like so many emigrants, Edith carried the imagined landscapes of her homeland’s literature with her, adapting and repurposing them to suit her new home. If Edith took her lead from Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and Henry Kingsley, she would have approached Australia’s shores anticipating fertile, verdant hills rich with the promise of great expectations.
It is always possible that I have this entire journey wrong. In a handwritten biographical note about Edith, Rica Erickson says that she ‘came to Western Australia with her parents in 1886, remaining in Perth for two years before sailing to Melbourne’. I can’t find any passenger lists to confirm or deny this, but George’s first-hand account of the voyage is detailed and adamantly different. Harry’s son Ivo also recalled it differently. The dates, from Harriett’s death, don’t add up. I have to choose which story to go with. The accepted family history seems the most convincing.
Towards the tail end of 1887, an intercolonial coaster attached itself to a trail of muddy water drifting out across the open bay and, like a dog homing in on a scent, followed it to the wide entrance of the Yarra River. The river headed north, between the low hills and open pastures, before snaking east towards Melbourne itself.
Ships of all shapes and sizes crowded the busy harbour – steamers, clippers, scows and barques. The Harms family would have been offloaded at the Sandridge Railway Pier, to be met by Harry, brown and healthy since leaving England’s damp shores a year earlier. The Exeter family was there to welcome them too, and bring their weary visitors home to stay with them until they found their land legs.
Migrants disembarking from a ship, about 1885
As the steam train pulled them away from the port and towards the city of Melbourne, a remarkable vista opened up from the Sandridge bridge, as they crossed diagonally over the busy brown Yarra. The northern riverbank was stacked with factories and warehouses. Teams of bullocks and horses clustered along the shore, carting goods to and from the docks. Steam trains rumbled along tracks behind the warehouses, their piercing whistles adding to the general cacophony. Beyond, a great city stretched before them, a grid of streets running parallel to the river, church spires, grand stone edifices, banks and businesses rising across a hazy horizon. Home to the famed Cole’s Book Arcade, the biggest bookshop in the world, visited by Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling. Everything brand-spanking new and modern. Steam, smog and smoke clouded the distant hills, the pungent smell of tanneries and industries from upstream mixing with the fetid aroma of the river itself.
Bourke Street looking east, Melbourne 1880–1900
This was Marvellous Melbourne – an astonishing place for a family from the rural backwaters of the English countryside. A city built on gold which, from a scraggly little wool town of 20,000 people, had become in just thirty years the second-largest city in the English empire after London itself. With a population of half a million people, Melbourne was bigger than Liverpool or Birmingham, on a par with St Louis or Boston.
‘Everywhere they looked, the humble buildings of the early colonists were being pulled down,’ describes Melbourne historian, Michael Cannon, ‘and in their place were rising the great granite piles of myriad financial institutions . . . Business boomed. Banking boomed. Money poured in from overseas. The frenzy grew and fed on itself. Thousands of acres of suburban land were subdivided and resold many times, each time at a higher price. Millions of shares changed hands in a stock exchange saturnalia. Anyone, it seemed, could make a fortune in this incredible colony.’
Just the place for a
