It was true that when the legislators in Macquarie Street thought of the impact land laws were making, they tended to have in their minds the better-watered central-western regions of the state, places where a prudent selector might survive. But, as Edward argued of the legislators, ‘They knew no more of these parts than we know of the moon.’ He emphasised that the proposed new colony would be about 60 000 in population, more than Victoria’s population when she separated from New South Wales and more than twice Queensland’s. The colony’s revenues would be drawn from the Barrier silver mines to the south. Only water was needed to develop the rich resources of the area, he said, and to him as to many colonists the water problem was half beaten by water conservation and the sinking of more wells.
Dickens also felt that the existence of a new colony would hasten Federation, which he felt was impossible while petty jealousies prevailed. The new western state would build bridges and roads which would knit together the region with other states. The Federation Convention held in Sydney in 1883 had been merely an excuse for delegates to journey to beauty spots and to engage in after-dinner oratory, he said. But the new colony he foreshadowed would be devoted to cooperating in a genuine way in the Federation project. The more realistic delegates from the river port of Bourke were not in favour of separation because of the lack of a seaport, and so the separatist dream remained unresolved and, under the breath of the drought, withered away.
During the drought and the separation debate, Edward’s company was in great need of funds and he needed £800. Some claimed that as well as suffering the impact of the drought, he had been gambling. He wrote a begging letter to his Aunt Georgie but was refused. Next he appealed to his brother Henry, the successful London barrister. Though dubious, Henry at last sent the money.
A new Land Act for New South Wales was to make special provisions for the far west of the state. According to the act, the minimum homestead lease was for a ‘run’ of 5000–10 000 acres. The owner had to live on the property for at least six months of every year and fence the outer boundaries within two years. Most westerners still considered such an area would not be viable. But Edward—to his own relief, since he needed the income—was appointed an Inspector of Runs. The Chairman of the Wilcannia Board, equally anxious to earn an income now that he had lost all, arrived in December 1884. It was Frederic Trollope, son of Anthony. Thus the sons of the two most notable English novelists of the nineteenth century were at the same time living in this small and inaccessible town far in the interior of Australia and just scraping by. No Barchester Towers were visible in that country. The towers there were pillars of sand moving on an arid wind.
The long drought ended in January 1885, with floods in the Darling and Paroo rivers. The result, as so often when droughts broke, was damaging floods which swamped many houses. Plorn, having himself taken up a homestead lease of 10 000 acres—a great reduction on the square mileages in South Australia on which he had lost money—led a delegation to Sydney to talk about the realities of life in the west. Like all Wilcannians, he felt the threat of extinction in the fact that the railway had reached Dubbo to the east and was proposed for Bourke, further up the river, bypassing Wilcannia. As well as that, a tramway was being built to connect Menindee in the south with Silverton, the mineral town near Broken Hill. It seemed that Edward’s beloved town was being abandoned.
In 1886 Fred Trollope left town to take up full-time employment in the Lands Department in Sydney. Plorn replaced him as a member of the Wilcannia Licensing Court, an assistant to the Chairman of the Land Court. He was elected alderman and was still playing cricket, honoured by his fellow Wilcannia players after a game against stockmen from Nuntherungie station. A new electorate of Wilcannia was established in 1888 to send a member of the Legislative Assembly to Macquarie Street, and Plorn was asked to stand as the Protectionist candidate. He was attracted to Protectionism, even though many pastoralists were Free Trade, for the way it had kept the prices of grain and livestock high and thus profitable in Victoria, which he believed was outstripping New South Wales in wealth and power. Many New South Welshmen thought their colony would benefit from a similar policy, and a National Protection Association was formed.
A bill to establish payment of members had been supported by all parties and passed early in 1888. Since Plorn was now a man of scant resources, a few of his friends collected money for him to last him till the legislation came in, and payment of members began. Five days after Dickens’ nomination, Mr Charles Fartiere of Maryfields Station was persuaded to stand as a Free Trader. Dickens’ policy speech declared that ‘the splendid position and general prosperity of the neighbouring colony of Victoria’ was the outcome of Protection. But he would also campaign for a new Land Act, the present one being a dismal failure. Nine out of ten homestead lessees, he asserted, would clear out tomorrow if they could get even nine-tenths of their money back. But the government would not compensate graziers for improvements on their properties, and people did not want to walk away and let a new leaseholder have the benefit. The rabbit was an essential part of his platform too. As an example of the sort of cost to pastoralists that Plorn was struggling to explain to urban legislators in Sydney, Momba Station spent up to £3000 a month on rabbit extermination.
The election was held. There was a time lapse while votes were retrieved from all over the huge, 200 000-square-mile (500 000-square-kilometre) electorate. But it emerged that Dickens had won by a two-to-one majority. At the end of summer, Plorn departed with his wife Connie by coach on the first leg of his journey to Macquarie Street, and on 5 March 1889 was introduced to Parliament. Sir George Dibbs, the Protectionist, was temporarily in power. Dibbs would be defeated as soon as Parliament convened when some of his own Protectionists dissented from a proposed severe Protection law, disapproved of his lack of interest in Federation, and crossed the floor to vote with Sir Henry Parkes. Such fluidity was characteristic of the loose groupings of colonial politics. Dibbs and Parkes would exchange the premiership a number of times during Plorn’s incumbency.
The Sydney the Dickenses came to had a population of 350 000 and must have seemed a metropolis indeed to Edward and Connie, who took up residence at a hotel in Gresham Street. During his time in Parliament, Plorn took the opportunity to found an office of E.B.L. Dickens in Sydney. Dickens’ six years in the Legislative Assembly came at a time when the collapse of the land boom brought desolation to the finances of the Australian colonies, and he must sometimes have thought himself fortunate to be receiving a parliamentary salary. But from the first, he campaigned as promised, not least attacking the unsatisfactory reaction of Macquarie Street to the great degrader of the pastoral landscape, the rabbit. Apart from certain bacteria which reached the indigenous peoples even before they had so much as seen a white man, the rabbit had been Australia’s most successful European explorer, having, while retaining perfect health, conquered Australia to its very core within less than a hundred years of settlement. As we shall see, they had their abettors. In 1892 Beatrix Potter would rivet British children with The Tale of Peter Rabbit, but to the children of the bush and their parents the rabbit was not a charming mischief-maker in a blue coat but a consumer of futures and destinies. Stock riders on the stations herded thousands at a time into a ‘battue’, a trap with calico wings which funnelled the pests into a small yard where local children clubbed them to death. But that was not adequate. A Rabbit Department had been set up by the New South Wales government to administer a system under which bounties were paid for the scalps of dead rabbits, but some squatters began to suspect that rabbiters employed under it left enough of their prey behind to ensure a recurrent plague. It was believed that men looking to make a living might release rabbits in an area, and then go to the farmers and be paid to kill them. John Reid, manager and part-owner of Tintinallogy, a station between Wilcannia and Menindee, said that the first thing trappers did in an area was not to kill rabbits, but their natural enemies, the
goanna, hawks, feral cats and dingoes. Samuel Hubbe, German-born Chief Vermin Inspector for South Australia, said that rabbits had been liberated in 1874 in the Barrier Ranges in New South Wales, and at Campbell’s Creek on the Darling. He believed they had been deliberately released in South Australia as well.
Needless to say, by the time Plorn got to Macquarie Street, the government had received many complaints of the ineffectuality of the eradication scheme. In his maiden speech in the Legislative Assembly, he would announce that, in some cases, the capacity to carry livestock had been reduced by half through the rabbit plagues.
Being a political novice, Edward Dickens was soon trapped into indiscretions. From his earliest speeches he suffered from being both Dickens’ son and a man from dry Wilcannia. The editor of Haynes Weekly, John Haynes, the co-founder with J.F. Archibald of the Bulletin and a Parkes disciple now in the House, orchestrated a campaign which implied that Edward had achieved his seat purely because he was the son of Charles Dickens. This led to Plorn declaring in the House that Haynes was ‘a servile supporter of Sir Henry Parkes’. Dickens pointed out that in 1884 Haynes had attacked Parkes in print over land policies. He read the text of Haynes’s eloquent attack: ‘It would be dangerous to give him the reins of government again . . . Over and over again he has told us that he was the architect of his own fortune. And over and over again we have thought he ought to have prosecuted the aforesaid architect.’
The Speaker objected to Dickens’ use of the word ‘servile’. Dickens made an apology and declared that he was only a young member of the House and that ‘sons of great men are not usually as great as their fathers. You cannot get two Charles Dickens in one generation.’ Ambiguously there were calls of ‘Hear! Hear!’
Dickens as a speaker held out no vision of future grandeur for the colonies. In his maiden speech he explained how the present Land Act, though framed with good intentions, was a failure.
I took up 100,000 acres as a homestead lessee. I spent about £250 cash upon it and it was one of the best areas available, being close to a town. I thought it better eventually to sacrifice the £250 and to allow the lease to be cancelled than to spend more money on it . . . The proportion of good seasons to bad seasons is about one in four. Therefore if these unfortunate men do get their heads a little above water in one season they are dragged down again.
Dickens’ speech was met with contempt. One pro-Parkes member said that the Honourable Member for Wilcannia ‘must lament the misery he has brought on the House tonight by bringing forward at such an untimely period the grievances of his constituents’. But, he said, Dickens should not underestimate the number of friends the far west had on the other side of the House.
Dickens mentioned that Parkes too had attacked the men of that western region because they didn’t buy their necessities from and sell their produce in New South Wales. They would be glad to, said Plorn, but they could not get their goods to or from Sydney cheaper than they could to and from other places. Then he made the point that Sydney had received in rain in March 1889 an inch more than Wilcannia had received in the whole year of 1888.
Dickens’ speech yielded no fruit and when he next rose, on the night of 23 May 1889, it was to comment on a new Crown Lands Bill, introduced by James Nixon Brunker, a stolid Maitland butcher and Parkes’ Minister for Lands. Dickens’ speech took for granted—as the man himself did—that these far western leaseholds could be made fruitful, an idea of which he, along with his fellow Britons, would never be cured despite all the evidence about rainfall and pasture he himself presented to the House. However, if a man had to abandon his lease, ‘Compensation for water improvements is a right’. If this were done, said Dickens, hundreds of men walking around the country with swags on their shoulders would find employment, apparently because new lessees would take up the improved land and make further improvements and would need labour. But if men were not able to take over abandoned leases at a fair price, ‘the Government will find that they will have on their hands a lot of silted up tanks, a lot of fences tumbling down, and wells falling in.’ If members would look at the government astronomer’s rainfall map, they would get some idea of the difficulties which the tenants in the western country faced. He then quoted the rainfalls for 1884—Milparinka 2.18, Bourke 6.83, Wilcannia 3.23, Wentworth 4.59, Menamurtie 1.86, Pack Saddle 2.11. For brave leaseholders who tried to conserve water under such conditions, compensation from the state should be automatic.
The Governor of New South Wales, Lord Carrington, said Dickens ‘had the pluck last year’ to take a land trip from Bourke to Broken Hill, and had said at Wilcannia that he thought he had seen some of the most miserable country in the world. The governor said he had been to the second cataract of the Nile, but he could not have believed, if he had not seen it, that there was so much desolation and misery within 50 miles of Wilcannia.
Dickens knew of this desolation. He told Parliament the story of a man who drove 32,000 sheep towards market in Cobar, of whom 14,000 to 15,000 perished on the road. He sold the rest at a lesser price because of their condition, and after paying all expenses had lost £993 and also was lacking his 32,000 sheep. ‘Here is the case of a man who started in 1880. In 1883 and 1884 he lost 80,000 sheep, in 1885 he had a fair season, in 1887 he lost 7,000 lambs and spent £27,000 in restocking his country. In 1888 he lost 50,000 sheep, in 1881 he had 2,000 bales of wool and in 1884, 700.’ Hence, marginal returns.
Members seemed to be getting sick of being lectured by Plorn Dickens. The new Land Bill, with fewer blemishes from Dickens’ point of view, was passed in the Assembly on 18 December 1890 and was rushed through the Council, its speedy passage there being guided by Edward’s old friend the storekeeper from Momba, W.H. Suttor, who believed it a great improvement over the previous Act.
As for the issue of the rabbit, we know Plorn was just as persistent. During an adjournment debate he heard members cry, ‘Hang the rabbits, we are sick of rabbits!’ to which the Minister for Lands exclaimed, ‘Hear! Hear!’ If Parliament had been a schoolyard, Plorn would have been one of the bullied boys. But his younger brother Henry, a barrister soon to be a judge in England, reported the story that his little brother had routed the Member for Bourke, W.N. Willis, with the sally, ‘Mr. Speaker, my late honoured father once wrote. “Barkis is willing”. If he had been here tonight, he would have said, “Willis is barking.”’
Early in the next session Edward asked if plans to extend the railway line from Cobar to Wilcannia would be introduced during that session of legislation. (He had earlier written to Parkes on the matter: ‘At the present time we are alienated from Sydney and are forced to deal with South Australia [and sometimes Victoria when the Rivers Darling and Murray are navigable].’) The minister told him it would not be. The truth was both that the railway would save Wilcannia from its crippling and expensive isolation, but also that with the depression having bitten, the great age of governments building railways on money borrowed in London were gone. British financial institutions with money to invest in ventures in far places were turning their attention to South America and to a Western Australia transformed by the desert gold reefs of Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie.
Edward and Sir Henry were together in Broken Hill on 4 April 1890, looking on its changing landscape, pastoralists now outnumbered by industrially militant miners. Along the Barrier the union organiser was replacing the drover, and he was likely to travel on bicycle rather than by a Waler, the sturdy hybrid horse ridden in the wilderness. Edward went on ahead to Wilcannia to prepare for a visit by Sir Henry, and civic groups began planning the reception on the Darling’s august banks where the powerful old man would be presented with the town’s, the region’s special needs. But the seventy-five-year-old Parkes found Wilcannia a reach too far and a session of the House in Macquarie Street was about to begin. He left for Sydney via Adelaide and Melbourne without visiting the town.
So Edward ploughed his lonely parliamentary
furrow, and no one took any notice.
THE GREAT RABBIT PRIZE
It was believed that the initial rabbit infestation of Australia began not with the less hardy species brought on earlier ships but with the consigning of two dozen grey European rabbits in 1859 from James Austin in Glastonbury, Somerset, to his brother Thomas Austin, a Geelong district pastoralist, who wanted to use them for hunting and eating. (His crime of folly is partly expiated by his widow’s ultimately endowing the Austin Hospital in Melbourne.) The rabbits swiftly spread to neighbouring properties, and Austin spent a considerable sum trying to exterminate them to appease outraged graziers. One of them, John Robertson of Wando Vale, spent more than £30 000 trying to wipe them out.
The rabbits reached the Murray River by 1872, and by 1884 had appeared along the Lachlan and Darling. They somehow crossed the central deserts and could be found in Western Australia by 1894, having by then also infested Queensland and South Australia. Government and private expenditures applied to hunting and poisoning having failed to diminish the population, New South Wales under the premiership of Sir Henry Parkes, now eighty-one years old and enjoying a fourth term, had decided in 1887 to offer a reward of £25 000 for the biological obliteration of the rabbit. To claim the prize devised by Parkes and Minister of Mines Francis Abigail, the saviour of pastoral Australia would need to prove the efficacy of his method to an Inter-Colonial Royal Commission on Rabbit Destruction (itself, in being intercolonial, a harbinger of Federation), and the eradication process would need to operate successfully for twelve months.
The advertisement of the New South Wales prize was published in Europe, and the great French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur had it pointed out to him at a friend’s dinner table. He ordered his nephew Adrien Loir, barely twenty years of age, to prepare flasks of virulent cultures of chicken cholera, cultivated in water in which beef had been boiled, to take to Australia. The Pasteur Institute was cash-poor, but Pasteur was so confident as Loir departed with two small boxes of chicken cholera flasks that he assured his bankers that Loir would soon be back with the £25 000 reward.