Raven Hart in South Gippsland
A short while ago we shared the story of the mad Major Raven-Hart and his canoeing adventures on the Gippsland Lakes in, it seems, 1946. This week we’ll share his trip to South Gippsland.
I shouldn’t call him a “mad Major”, of course. I never knew him, after all, but he was certainly a very odd fellow, and thereby hangs a tale worth telling. I’ll get to it.
He spent Christmas and new year in a Sale hotel but he doesn’t say which one, and thought it a “solid, stolid, conservative, rich town”. The shops were “passable” but the bookshop was “poor”. There were two lending libraries, one at the bookshop and one at the Mechanics Institute Hall “consisting of fiction with a small proportion of travel-books and biographies but without a single book of reference, even at Atlas.”
He was a little surprised to find that Sale’s sporting clubs were all denominational, except the bowls club. (Sale) has two cathedrals. The Church of England one very dead in spite of a Bishop”.
The flounder-spearing took him, his host and the host’s son by a series of bush tracks down past Seacombe and they launched the little wooden boat on the back of the utility into Lake Reeve where they speared from the boat. With an underwater light, over 200 fish. Mostly flounder but with a few bream “locally ‘brim’; we could have had several trout but spearing these is illegal”. I read recently of a man catching 120 blackfish in the Cardinia Creek (many years ago). Thank Heaven we now have at least some control over this greed, so that our grandchildren might enjoy fishing.
Also, on this overnight trip “We stopped to shoot a wallaby, and several rabbits, and a kangaroo; this last for my benefit. So that I might be invited to taste kangaroo-tail soup (It is rather like beef-tea made from venison, if you can imagine that.)”
He found that though there were normally tours from Sale to Bulga Park and Tarra Valley they were not being run this year (1947?) but a guest at the hotel offered to drive him. Raven-Hart is appalled at the number of dead “spars” all along the road, “one of the most depressing views imaginable… everywhere the accusing fingers of ring-barked dead trees…”.
“Bulga Park is a small gorge…It gave me treeferns for the first time, artificial-looking things like Japanese umbrellas…” Bulga Park was being run by the council but he found that Tarra Valley was being run by the state government and the shire together, unusually. The Warden there introduced him to something called the ‘Sneezer Bush’ but he never found out and so could not tell us the proper name.
The Warden at Tarra Valley showed him treeferns and myrtle, sassafras and orangewood and some mountain ash that amazed him with its height. “One of them would build you a good-sized house,” he said. “walls and floors and doors and all. And have enough left over for the furniture too, likely.”
He next comments on Port Albert, as I said in the last Raven-Hart story, including this “Just why we went to Port Albert I don’t know; it is a bleak, wind-swept, shabby little place with a few fishing-boats tied up. Shark liver is their main export, I learnt.” Cop that, Port Albert.
“We drove back through Yarram, a quiet little town with one good street; the streets parallel and next to it suggested inescapably the backstage of an elaborate theatre-set, all odds and ends of shacks and shanties.”
On the way back up the highway to Sale he notes that there were “campers…dotted about beside it: that is one advantage of the wide strips of grass beside Australian roads, you just pull off the macadam and fix your caravan legs or pitch your tent, with no need o trouble about leave from anyone. That may be one reason why caravan-trailers are so popular in Australia…”
He makes a few comments that I found interesting, for various reasons. He noted that there was an Australian ‘type’ – “Grey eyes were a definite feature, blue eyes being rare and black ones still rarer, except in the case of Greek and Italian café and fruit=shop keepers… with maturity the men do not so much become fat as wide … there was just room for me and one Australian on the average tramway seat…when two Australians had to share such a seat, someone had to overlap markedly into the aisle.”
“I left Sale with regrets. One could live very happily there, although the climate is on the cold and wet side for my India-conditioned tastes…houses are not so astronomically unattainable as in the cities, and one could have a garden, or even land enough for hens and a cow, and there is shooting and fishing, and sea- and pool-swimming, and all sorts of games and social activities – although in a conservative place like Sale it would be some time before the new-comer ceased to be regarded as a “blow-in”, to use the expressive Australian phrase.”
Raven-Hart makes many comments about Australia that might offend some of us. Writing in 1947 (I think) he is generally very positive about Australia and Australians, Generally. Not always.
It is always interesting to see yourselves through a different lens, is it not? Let me share a few of his comments with you.
“The hotel was fair, with the usual unimaginative food; one could write the menus for most Australian hotel meals before going into the dining-room,”
“Vandalism seems commoner in Australia than in England, possibly as part of the ‘heman’ pose, a noisy assertion of unsure virility.”
“At night, when the yellow street-lamps are switched on, of that particular type which makes people look like partly-decomposed corpses, the effect is indescribable..”
“…few cafes open before nine…” and “’Braised” means boiled, usually to a rag.”
Of the “Victoria Palace near the (Melbourne) Town Hall.. extremely cheap, even for Melbourne. My breakfasts used to average 1/6d and lunches not much more… (wait for it!) It was an inestimable joy to be free of Australian waitresses.”
“Dinner music’ at 5.45pm…lots of drunks but invariably friendly, too friendly.”
A few of these are from notes he had not written into his manuscript bt he is, as I said, generally well-disposed toward Australia.
He had canoed on the Murray and the Gippsland Lakes, on the Hawkesbury and the Nile, on the Mississippi and the Irrawaddy. His books sold all around the world – and he has been largely forgotten. Perhaps next week, or in very few weeks, anyway, I’ll be able to introduce you. I just need a few more facts.