Laurel Robertson is a writer and farm manager living in Trentham, Australia, with a particular interest in the relationship between culture and landscape. Her works have been published in Wild Melbourne and Voiceworks.
Lachlan’s personal essay Passage reflects on her great-grandmother’s journey by boat to Australia from Scotland after the First World War.
Passage
In spring my grandfather and I drive north-east from Melbourne to his hometown of Yea. He wants to show me the farm where he grew up. It’s not a long drive, only an hour and half in good traffic, but we make a day of it. We trace an indirect route through the Valley of a Thousand Hills and as we drive, Pa tells me about his parents.
It was the evening of April 16th when Mary left Waverley Station, her train passing under the watchful eye of the Balmoral Hotel’s clocktower and the great escarpment of Arthur’s Seat. It would take her down the spine of Britain: she was heading south for the very first time. Past Newcastle, to London, on to Tilbury with its docks, and from there across the sea. There were two of them in the carriage: Mary and her friend Bessie. Both bound on the same journey halfway across the world, to marry soldiers they hadn’t seen in years. It is impossible to know what they felt. If fear tinged their excitement, if they held hands as their train bore them through the night, if Mary knew that she would never return to Scotland.
They met during the war. William, my great-grandfather, was a gunner at the Somme fighting for the ANZACs. When he was given leave, he travelled to Edinburgh to visit his cousins. Mary Burnside, my future great-grandmother, lived in the house next door. The two hit it off and, much to the disapproval of Mary’s parents, spent a weekend on the shores of Loch Lomond. She later promised to follow William back to Australia and to start a life together there.
‘It was smaller when I was a kid,’ Pa says as we pass through Yea, a one-street town with only two blocks of shops. We cross the Goulburn River and turn left off the highway; the road quickly shifts from tarmac to gravel to dirt. We rise into yellow hills until we come to a gated driveway where Pa stops the car.
This is the driveway to the old property, he explains. We can’t go any further. Pa doesn’t know the current owners. A few old fireplaces stand up from the grass in the valley below us, marking out the site of an old homestead. ‘That was the original farmer’s home,’ Pa tells me. ‘The property was subdivided after the war. Government didn’t have enough money to pay their soldiers so they gave them land instead.’
We look out across the land sweeping north and east, a mass of hills crinkled like an unmade bed. The air is hot around us.
‘The one thing I always want to know is what season it was when she came here,’ Pa says. ‘Coming from Scotland, it must have been a shock.’
Mary was disappointed by the few hours she spent in London. It was night when she and Bess checked their luggage into the station and went out to see the city for the first and last time. The weather was worse than it had been in Edinburgh, and they were tired from the hours on the train. After a brief look at the dark Thames, they returned to St Pancras and caught the train to Tilbury.
The S.S. Bahia Castillo stood at port like a fortress with its magnificent chimneys towering over everything in sight. It was a German-made steamer, used in the war to ferry munitions but given over to the Allies in reparation. Now it was bound for Australia, bearing supplies, returning soldiers, and a small group of passengers. Mary and Bessie presented their papers at the dock and were shown to their cabins.
Mary was shocked to learn she wouldn’t be bunking with Bessie; she found two English girls already unpacking in her cabin. Bessie was only a few doors down the corridor, but they were ordered to remain in their quarters, and Mary had to endure the English girls’ accents alone.
As the ship departed the guests waved down to a crowd assembled at the dock. That night there was roast chicken for dinner and Mary found the wishbone in her piece. She took it as an omen, telling her she had made the right decision.
‘I thought you should have this,’ says Pa, holding out what looks like a black exercise book. ‘Considering you’re the writer in the family.’
I hold the book and realise it is very old, the lacquer on its cover cracked. The corners of its spine are frayed. I open it to a random page, careful not to harm the brittle paper. It is filled with line after line of perfect cursive–written with the unmistakable flourishes of a fountain pen.
‘It was your great-grandmother’s,’ he explains. ‘It’s her journal from when she came out to Australia. I thought you might write something about it.’
Few relics remain from Mary Burnside. Of all my family she has been surrounded by the greatest mythology. She died before I was born, and what I know of her I know only through story. This journal is a precious fragment of family history.
Mary was tired of talking with the girls in her cabin. She rose early, intending to step out onto the deck, but as she dressed, she was overcome by a swell of nausea and spent the whole day in bed.
A nurse visited Mary in the morning, telling her that only two of the 103 second class passengers had been out of bed the previous day. In the afternoon, Mary made it out of the cabin. On deck she met one of the stowaways, who had now taken work aboard the ship as a stoker down in the engine rooms. The man said his sister was aboard the ship as a second class passenger. She was bound for Australia to meet with her husband.
That night the new moon was reflected perfectly by the sea. It felt like they were sailing across a second sky.
‘It’s her fault I never finished school,’ Pa says. ‘She was always filling my head with stories of adventure. Of Scotland. Of Bonnie Prince Charlie, Robert the Bruce, and William Wallace. There was no room for school.
‘My father was good with his hands,’ he continues. ‘Whenever I was sitting down he would come into the house and get me up fixing fences or moving the cows into a new field. But my mother was the educated member of the family. The only one to finish school.’
Before leaving for Australia, Mary worked as an editor for a local publishing company. With her she brought a collection of books, and frequently ordered new editions from Scotland. On my shelf at home I have the complete works of Oscar Wilde, another heirloom inherited from Mary. As well as books, she passed on her love of the history of her homeland to Pa and to my father, and from him to me. After finishing school, I moved to Scotland to study, turning the arc of migration in full circle.
On Tuesday, the sea shifted from green to blue.
Mary and some others went to the washroom in the morning to do their ironing. There was only one iron so it took some time, but they enjoyed the chance to chat, and looking out at the water they spotted a shark. Later a sailor showed Mary a porpoise. It bounded across the waves, playing in the wake of their ship.
On Wednesday, the heat was unbearable. Mary sat on deck and watched the diggers play football. She drank lime juice and ate oranges with the other women. Wiping at the sweat on her brow she wondered if she would ever have another proper cold drink in her life. Water was always cold in Scotland. She hadn’t known to cherish it at the time.
That morning a sailing ship had passed their boat at full tilt, its deck seeming to tip dangerously close to the water. The Bahia Castillo signalled the yacht and the men aboard raised an unfamiliar flag. Mary wasn’t sure which country they were from, but she thought their craft moved beautifully through the water.
Thursday was a glorious morning. Mary and the girls spotted two more sharks, and another porpoise. The next day, towards evening, it rained briefly. Mary hoped it would last just long enough to break the heat.
‘She never wanted to go back,’ says Pa over breakfast. We are in a Fitzroy café. It is 2016, nearly a century after Mary set foot aboard the Bahia Castillo. I eat my poached eggs and smashed avocado and listen to Pa. ‘I offered to take her. We both did, me and Miles. But she never wanted to go back. I don’t know why. She left behind her parents, four sisters, and who knows how many cousins. They wrote to each other every week. Her parents sent her the newspaper from Edinburgh and she sent them the Yea Standard. But she never went back.’
Mary left Britain in a time of depression. The war left the nation poor and the population shrunken. ‘Everyone lost someone close to them,’ Pa says. ‘It’s just how the war was. If it wasn’t your brother it was your cousin.’
In Australia she found a nation no less stricken by the toll of conflict. Yea was a town of returned soldiers and their families. They met on the weekends and held picnic races. Her husband woke in the night screaming. His terrors would wake the children, and Mary would comfort them as William stood outside, his mind drawn once more to the Somme.
Mary didn’t have time to read. There were too many things to do on board, too many strands of conversations, too many people. She decided to wash her hair. Warm water was hard to come by on the ship but Mary smiled at the steward when she asked him for it and the man relented. Dorothy Bullock, one of the English girls, offered to dry her hair. They sat in the cabin while Mary washed her hair, and afterwards Dorothy rubbed it with a towel. After dinner, Mary and the others held a party in their cabin, inviting some of the diggers. They sat up playing cards and sharing stories of home, and decided to do this regularly.
Pa always tells me that the three happiest moments of Mary’s life occurred when she was living in a canvas tent by the Goulbourn River in the early years of her marriage. William taught her to ride a horse, kill a snake, and swim in the river. The farm on the river was their own private world, shaped by their hands. But life on the Bahia Castillo offered its own freedom.
Mary’s journal presents only a shard of this woman I never knew. It is a glimpse into an in-between time, leaving one family to create another. Aboard the Bahia Castillo Mary was her own person.
Two months after she had left Tilbury docks, Mary packed her bag and a digger carried it for her to the hold. In the morning they would arrive in Melbourne. At supper there was a farewell dinner. Mary retired early with her cabin mates and together they sat up late into the night. They spoke about the last nine weeks in each other’s company, and how sad they were that it all must come to an end.
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