The early years
My father’s parents came from Ireland and settled on a miserable farm at Corop, in northern Victoria. Their farm was parched in summer and a bog in winter, for it ran to the edge of the Wallanjo Swamp. They lived in a frame house of great crudity furnished only with the essentials for eating, sleeping and sitting. I spent happy holidays there.
Near the swamp I chased foxes on horseback with the aid of a couple of greyhounds, and on occasions I ran the fox into a hollow log and then smoked it out and killed it. I’m afraid I did not respect the closed season for duck; and being a competent shot at an early age my bags of ducks out of season were substantial. Once, having fired both barrels into a flock of ducks rising from a dam, I suddenly saw a team of horses pulled up on a neighbouring farm and a man with a white hat rushing towards me. His name was Leith and he was a kind of warden, appointed to detect out-of-season shooters. How scared I was. I promptly dropped the gun in six inches of water at the foot of a tree. Gathering in two or three ducks, I also concealed them under the water. I then made off through the swamp with my heart pounding.
I have a memory of an event which still moves me. A magnificent team of draught horses was the family’s most prized possession. One year bot flies were prevalent and one by one the horses died as a result of the scourge and were burned on the edge of the swamp. A feeling of heartbreak was experienced by my two uncles who ran the farm.
One uncle, Dan, was slightly deaf. In search of a cure he submitted himself to a charlatan and as a result lost the remainder of his hearing. I can still see him of a summer’s night, trying to extract music from a violin. He had no skill but playing the violin was his way of escape from the crude realities of a poor farm.
When my father left the farm he went to a little township named Gourmont, some eighteen miles from Bendigo. At Goornong the country store was run by an uncle of my mother’s, and there my father commenced as an assistant and subsequently rose to the height of managership. It was also at Goornong that my father met and married my mother, Mary Agnes Mulcair, who had emigrated from Ballylyn near Croagh in County Limerick, reaching Australia after one of those interminable voyages which were inevitable in her day. She was an attractive woman of great common sense, by which I do not mean harshness. A sheet anchor of the family, she knew no actual poverty but she very often needed an extra pound.
When I was born in Goornong, on 10 April 1891, the hamlet was not yet in decline. It had three hotels, a blacksmith’s shop and a railway station; two of the hotels were speedily closed. My father managed the general store for Pat Hayes, who was quite a figure in Bendigo and at one time Mayor. We were very much the poor relations from whom considerable respect was required by the members of the Hayes family. It’s strange how life alters things. The Hayes’ competency dwindled away very quickly after the old man’s death and fortune favoured my family moderately, so that eventually my father did acquire a competency. He was able to provide for the family comfortably and to take his place as a figure on the plains country between Bendigo and Echuca.
My father’s weekly wage of £4 at Goornong did not permit any excessive living. I and my two younger sisters, Mary and Kathleen, were well fed and clothed but there was no spare cash. A few miles away, at Fosterville, shallow gold was discovered when I was very young; and by some means my father managed to obtain a few hundred shares in one of the mines. These shares rose to substantial prices, and for a week or so the family fortunes hovered at a height undreamed of. My father did not sell the shares. Later they fell to nothing, and I have always felt an intense sorrow for the hopes which rose so quickly and were so speedily dissipated.
My uncle, Thomas Mulcair, loved the turf and was a patron of all the country trainers. He had not a lot of money but always apparently managed to find sufficient for a broken trainer who, in those days, led his horses around the country. On this occasion he had assured my mother that he would place 5s. for her on some certain winner in the country. I was about 12 or 13 at the time, and I recollect how the day after the race, my mother sent for the newspaper and learned that the horse had won at 6/1. My mother was vocal in her excitement. Details of what she planned to do with the 30s. would have filled a notebook. A day or two afterwards the tragedy occurred; we heard that instead of starting at 6/1 the horse’s odds had been 6/1 on. I must confess that I subsequently thought of this episode one year when I received some £700 from an insurance policy which by some miracle my father had established for me when I was young. After going into practice, of course, I had paid the premiums on this policy but I was still at a fairly youthful age when the policy matured. That week I had a likely horse running at Geelong and I am ashamed to say that I caused to be invested – I like the word ‘invested’ – the sum total of the policy. I still have the photograph which shows three horses hitting the post at the same time: in fact they were so close that only two are visible. A wise judge decided that my horse had won and I received back my stake of some £700 at odds of approximately 3/1 or 7/2. It’s a shameful story perhaps, but as I am speaking the truth here the
story must be told. I have often wondered why insurance companies don’t use this story to advertise the advantages of insurance.
My mother’s brothers – Thomas, Eugene, John and Jim Mulcair – were respected citizens around Goornong. Tom, the turf lover, was a most sympathetic character who couldn’t avoid interesting himself in the problems of the district and he in time took over the store which my father had originally managed. He became a confidant of most of the local farmers. He gave them credit, and when the crops were bad the repayment had to stand over until the following year.
I noticed that when one of his impecunious customers managed to acquire a pony of some ability, he would provide him with the necessary £20 to enable an investment to be made on the animal. He introduced me to racing at unregistered meetings held for the local Church, when occasionally I was told that my half crown had been on a winner at 2/1. This inspired my ambition to get money quickly. My first wager of consequence was on a local football match. At a very tender age, I scandalised the community by laying 7s.6d. to 3s.9d. on the Goornong team. Unfortunately, I won the wager: otherwise my cure would not have been so long deferred. Uncle Tom is buried in the little town which he served so well for so long. On his simple gravestone I caused to be engraved ‘Here lies a kind and good man’.
When I was aged about nine my father was transferred to manage the store in Bridge Street, Bendigo, for Mr Hayes. There was a vast statistical improvement in his salary which was raised from £4 to £5. Our weatherboard house was removed from Goornong to Bendigo as the family residence, and there re-erected. Many years afterwards and after the family had gone to Rochester, ?? miles north of Goornong, the house was bought in Bendigo by a stranger and moved back to Goornong; you can see it every time you drive from Goornong to Rochester, slightly on the outskirts of the town on the left hand side of the railway. I have never been in it since, but viewed from the exterior it appears to be in better condition now than when I was born in it. In small country towns the hotel keeper, the grocer, the policeman and the station master were usually people of considerable local importance: our house must have fitted our standing.
From the local State school at Goornong I moved to the Bendigo convent of the Sisters of Mercy and the St. Kilian’s School conducted by the Marist brothers. I was quickwitted rather than studious but did enough work to satisfy examiners. I was partial to writing essays and to debating and so was able to do myself more than justice in examinations.
In 1904 – the Bendigo Austral Society, which conducted competitions for pianoforte, singing, recitations and amateur theatricals, decided to offer a scholarship worth a total of £40 to a local student below the age of fourteen years. I was the fortunate winner. The formal announcement was made in Bendigo Princess Theatre on the final night of competitions which had extended over a week or two, Tommy Bent, then Premier of Victoria, was present to give the major prizes. I sat with my father in the balcony; I am sure that on that occasion my father, who was more than interested in the progress of his only son, was transferred to a higher heaven than Mohammed attained when he ascended with his ass.
The sum awarded was small, even in those days, but owing to the kindness of the Marist Brothers of St. Joseph’s College, I was enrolled in their school at Hunter’s Hill Sydney. Doubtless with much financial strain on the family reserves, I was retained as a boarder until 1909. I did pretty well in the Junior Public and Senior examinations, winning a couple of medals. I enjoyed every minute of my last couple of years at college; a privileged few of us formed a club known as the Fag Club, and those privileges which were not accorded to us we took of our own initiative. Quitting college was quite a sad day for me.
I do not know what caused me to decide on entering the legal profession, but in 1909 I was articled to a young solicitor in Bendigo. I refrain from mentioning his name because he certainly has grandchildren who still revere his memory. His career was brilliant but brief. There was probably no country solicitor of the time who was his equal in Court. His appearance was attractive, his vocabulary excellent and his knowledge of the law well above the average. He won many cases and attracted attention even from the judges who visited Bendigo on circuit. Unfortunately his business soon competed with his increasing taste for the turf. It became his habit to visit Melbourne every weekend to enhance the earnings from his profession. No matter what case occupied him, nor how remote from Bendigo, there has to be a conveyance with a pair of horses available for him to catch the Friday night train to Melbourne. His betting losses on the Saturday soon necessitated a stop-over to repair his losses by attending the ponies on Monday. A taste for liquor was also acquired and it is more than probable that he willingly succumbed to other indulgences. Affairs in the office went from bad to worse. Old Charles Toolin, an experienced managing-clerk, held the fort so long as it could be held, but trouble followed upon trouble, neglect upon neglect. Finally my master stood his trial for allegedly forging a mortgage document which should, instead, have been signed by a lady of substance with whom he was on terms of intimacy.
On the opening day of the trial my master, making his way to the Court house, was met by the local Bailiff whose mission was to serve bankruptcy papers. The Bailiff’s Officer was persuaded by someone to withhold the papers until the trial was over. A kindly Bendigo jury, which knew the accused and his highly respected father, had little difficulty in arriving at a verdict of Not Guilty, and within minutes the accused was whisked by friends down the spiral staircase at the back of the Bendigo Supreme Court, and taken in a car to Melbourne. Next day, he boarded a ship bound for New Zealand and the United States.
Two days out from Melbourne the fugitive took the air on deck, only to see in the distance the Bailiff’s officer whom he had met a few days earlier when on his way to the court. Very naturally he associated this man’s presence with recent events in Bendigo. My master therefore remained below, unrecognized, until the ship reached New Zealand. There he disembarked, and boarding another vessel he went on to Queensland where he took a menial job in a hotel. He was only thirty-two when he died. His misfortune was that he practised as a solicitor instead of a barrister. My good fortune was that I reversed the role.
Curiously, the Bailiff’s Officer from Bendigo was never again heard of. He had been privately lending funds provided by another Bendigo solicitor whose affairs were also in disorder and he had decided that the time was opportune to leave Australia; by chance he had booked a passage in the same ship as my master. The solicitor who financed the Bailiff’s Officer was not so fortunate. He was a quiet living man whose main vice, so far as we knew, was growing strawberries. He was convicted for the misapplication of client’s funds and he went to goal.
Of the many who practiced law in Bendigo at the time, most ended up in acute financial distress. I have never quite satisfied myself of the reason but we were at the end of the old gold days of free and easy living. No instruction was given to legal practitioners in the new art of bookkeeping, and so their clients’ money often became mixed with their own: the result was disastrous to both. In those days no fund was in existence to recoup the victims of legal dishonesty. When many years afterwards Albert Dunstan, the Premier of Victoria, was compelled by force of public opinion to introduce a rectifying measure, the chief opponent of the innovation was a Bendigo solicitor. Unfortunately the necessity for the innovation has since been well evidenced.
During the early days of my articles I had been initiated to the mysteries of betting on the nod. Although the Articled Clerk’s remuneration of the day varied from 5s a week to a maximum of £1, I somehow managed to indulge my habit without drifting into financial difficulties. At the age of seventeen, at Rochester, I made what was really the most important wager of my life. It was the last race; I was losing £28, and I laid £32 to £28 on. If the gallant animal – Lucykoff by Bobrikoff – had failed to win, my indebtedness on the nod for the days would have been £60. That was the equivalent of two years’ salary: I need say no more. I hope that, wherever good horses go, she has been provided with the best stall because the consequences of her failure would certainly have attached to me for the rest of my life. In the short term I would have had to draw heavily on my uncle Tom to meet this dreadful emergency and give embarrassing pledges to attend racecourses no more.
I was also taught the mysteries of poker and played it for sizeable sums against individuals with much more experience than I. A well known Bendigo policeman, Dick Hillams, introduced me to Plumpton coursing. He trained a greyhound named Windfall Mill on which I invested – you will note my choice of verb – with such success that I managed to accumulate about £100 in the Bank of New South Wales. This triumph satisfied me that there was not much more to learn, and I went with my £100 to the Waterloo Cup at Geelong. That coursing meeting extended over two days, with a race meeting intervening between the first and the second day. By the end of the first afternoon I had nothing left but my fare from Geelong to Melbourne and my return ticket from Melbourne to Bendigo. I cannot recall how I recovered from is debacle but I know it provided one of the rare occasions for an expression of severe paternal displeasure.
In Bendigo in my day a boarding house named Osborne House was largely patronised by the local ‘establishment’. Young men who stayed there included Tommy White, who later became Australian High Commissioner in London, McMullen and Goode who later were leading bankers, Elliott who became well known as a newspaper proprietor, and others who acquired distinction. The proprietor, Miss Harney, was charming, and acted towards many of her guests as a kindly mother. In Osborne House I achieved the remarkable distinction of holding two Royal flushes at poker.
My articles were transferred from my first master to Charles Neal, a bachelor solicitor, who led rather a recluse’s life. He was a highly respected student of the law but couldn’t bring himself to render bills of cost. As a result unrendered bills accumulated, even to beyond the statutory limit. Most matters rested for two, three or six years without any money being obtained on account. This, of course, did not make for prosperity. Charley was a gentleman in every way, meticulous in his devotion to legal research, but a better lawyer than businessman. Though he managed to receive sufficient money to see him through until his death, his income was only a fraction of that to which he was entitled.
He was not a strict master, and many of my days were given to Plumpton coursing and horse racing and a number of my evenings to poker. In the result I was ignorant of even very elementary matters connected with procedure; how the examiners passed me is a matter between themselves and their consciences. When eventually I went to the Bar I even had to start learning how to draw a Request for Further Particulars and Interrogatories, and my escape from disaster is but one of the many instances of the good fortune which has attended my life.
I did not employ my free time at the office on study, and so my study period began after midnight when my normal diversions were necessarily suspended. As I was not enrolled as a university student, material for study consisted of notes made by a student of an earlier year who provided them for a fee. It was a poor substitute for a liberal education. I suppose I was quick witted, and surprisingly had an ability to write answers to my exam questions in a way which could easily have deceived an examiner into a belief that I had more knowledge than I possessed. This facility charged its price, causing me to lack the profundity which rewarded the more conscientious student. It has affected me throughout my life and I have often regretted it.
By the time I had finished my clerkship I don’t think there was a more incompetent articled clerk in the State of Victoria. The reason for this was not liquor. I like a glass of wine, a glass of champagne; I like a properly served meal and good company and all that goes with it; but I was never a drinker. As far as I can review the position from this distant date, I wanted to live well too early. Looking at myself as impartially as I can, I would fix Bendigo and my clerkship period as the time of my larger ambitions: not noble ambitions, not to climb to the top of the tree and become a Judge or to become Prime Minister, but rather a belief that my circumstances were too narrow if I wished to enjoy life. Put bluntly, I wanted to live life to the full but I didn’t have the means to do it. Like many young people today I had the desire but not the means, and as a result I always had a strong interest in sporting events.
Bendigo of those days was a different place. The gold mines were still working, and we were awakened by the whistles summoning the new shift. When dividends were paid, a flag was flown at the poppet head. In addition a good deal of gold from the successful mines did not find its way into the Company’s battery but came out in the miners’ overalls. Just as many barmen feel that they are entitled to their perks when they work in a hotel, so the gold-miners were thought to be entitled to take a little gold from the mine. If you look up the newspapers of the time you will see stories of two intense moral reformers, Tregear and Judkins. Methodist ministers, the denounced this wickedness which was a cancer in Bendigo. The mine-owners and shareholders were also indignant over the loss of their gold, and they persuaded parliament to pass the Gold Buyers’ Act which made it an offence for anyone except a licensed gold buyer to buy gold. This attempt to close the illicit market for stolen gold and to have the gold-stealers forced to deal with the licensed gold-buyers led to many prosecutions and some convictions. It increased the business of the local solicitors for whom I worked.
While working in the law offices I was gripped by politics. In those days the Australian provincial cities were more important, politically, than now. Alfred Deakin was the federal member for Ballarat and Sir John Quick was the federal member for Bendigo; and they were mighty men. Sir John Quick was in many ways the idol of Bendigo. He had emigrated from Cornwall and had worked as a boy in a gold battery and a foundry before making his way, by his own efforts, up the educational ladder. A journalist and then a solicitor in Bendigo, Quick was one of the founders of the Commonwealth of Australia. An imaginative, scholarly man who possibly preferred to read quietly in his villa in Hamlet Street, than to address a crowded political meeting, he was called again and again to Bendigo’s platforms by people who were touchingly proud of a local man who had risen, as the newspapers noted repeatedly, ‘from battery boy to Postmaster General’. As he was a Methodist and a freemason and as he had married the daughter of a former mayor of Eaglehawk, Quick carried all the local electoral assets in his hands. As a gesture of higher esteem (and of his impregnability) he had not been opposed when he stood as a liberal-protectionist for Bendigo at the first federal election; but as the years passed by, the Labour Party became more powerful and Quick’s grip on a mining electorate relaxed. When Frank Brennan, a young and vitriolic-tongued member of the Labour Party, decided to oppose Quick in 1910, there was great excitement and, in anti-Labour circles, almost an air of consternation. The contest was bitter and was expected to be close. Great stress was laid by Sir John’s supporters on the fact that he was a cabinet minister and that it would be unwise for the constituency to reject one so highly placed in favour of an upstart seeking a career in the Labour party. In the end Quick won narrowly. I remember vividly the declaration of the poll and the comment made by Brennan. ‘It has been said that the constituency would have been unwise to reject a Minister, but in view of the return of a Labour Government I now have pleasure in asking how long will Sir John be Postmaster General’.
At the following federal election, in l9l3, Sir John Quick was opposed by John Arthur, a goldfields boy who had become a barrister with a considerable practice in the Arbitration Court. He was in his late thirties, a gentle, talented man, rather unfitted perhaps for the hurly burly of politics but sure to succeed by reason of his great capacity. I was young, and I threw myself into his campaign with enthusiasm. A new electoral law required that all contributions of electoral matter to newspapers should be signed by the writer. I described an imaginary steeplechase in which Sir John Quick fell and John Arthur triumphed. It had to bear my signature. So did some doggerel in consequence of which I became persona-non-grata in many Bendigo homes.
On the day of the election we hired a car which I caused to be driven as speedily as possible, carrying electors to the poll. Towards the end of the day I waited upon the nuns at the local Convent and pointed out their duty. They, being timid ladies and being unacquainted with what was at stake, yielded to my persuasions; and shocked bystanders observed the nuns being driven to the poll, obviously in support of the Labour candidate. The episode caused consternation both in Protestant and Catholic circles, and my popularity declined still further.
As a consolation John Arthur was elected by a margin of about 1,100 votes. We were firm friends and I watched with pride his dramatic rise in federal politics. Elected to parliament in 1913, he became Minister for External Affairs in 1914, but before Christmas of that year he was dead.
It was generally predicted that I, in my turn, would become the Labour candidate for Bendigo. But despite my radical views, I always had an aversion to joining any political party. I was rabidly independent and neither then nor later could I be persuaded to espouse a political creed. Later I did become a political candidate but certainly I was not influenced by genuine political ambitions.
I had passed all my legal examinations speedily, long before I was due for admission. The question to be resolved was whether I would practise as a barrister or a solicitor. I had seen something of the ways in which business was solicited during my articled clerkship with my first master. In Bendigo some rising solicitors believed they advanced their interests by exceptional devotion in the sect to which they belonged. Others were diligent senders of wreaths to families in which a recent death had provided possibilities of a reasonable estate for probate. Examining these avenues to success I decided that they were not for me. In addition my experience had given me a reluctance to handle other people’s money. In a spirit rather of self-preservation than of high ambition I decided not to be a solicitor in Bendigo but rather to go to the Bar in Melbourne.
I am still surprised by the sanity of my reasoning. My association with the chequered career of my first master was likely to be a handicap in Bendigo and my part in the defeat of Sir John Quick would be long remembered by the more prosperous citizens. On the debit side of my prospects as a barrister were the facts that I was ignorant even of the geography of Melbourne and had no connections amongst solicitors. None of those who knew or knew of me were likely to queue up for the right to brief me.
Arrangements were made for me to read with Herbert Bryant, a Melbourne barrister. I had met him once previously: instructed to wait for him at the Bendigo railway station, I delivered this message from my principal. ‘Mr Neal wants to know if you desire to see him this evening?’. I still remember his reply: ‘That is not relevant. The question is – does Mr Neal want to see me?’. Bryant moved my admission to the bar in March 1914 and my readership began. I was conscious of my vast ignorance and had enough sense to know that only by great application could I help myself.
Bryant was an impressive figure, always impeccably dressed. Being rather austere he was mostly regarded with respect rather than affection. From the outset he was kind to me and later admitted me to close friendship.
It was Bryant who once rebuked Mr Justice Hodges of the Supreme .Court, a man capable of considerable rudeness. Something had happened in Court to which Bryant took some offence, and he claimed that Hodges had been guilty of extreme and unjustified rudeness to him. Shortly afterwards they chanced to meet in the lavatory at the Australian Club. Hodges thereupon attempted a partial explanation and apology, to which Bryant answered curtly that he did not desire to be insulted in a Law Court and apologised to in a lavatory.
Years passed before I heard the story of how, as a young barrister, he had ruinously signed a joint-and-several-guarantee with a number of prosperous men who had speculated during the land boom of’ the late 1880’s. His objections at the time of signing had been contemptuously brushed aside by his co-adventurers. ‘What have you to lose?’ they asked, ‘it is we who have to worry’. But it was Bryant who was to do the worrying, and he worried throughout his professional life. The boom burst, big liabilities arose out of the guarantee, and he told me that not one of his associates had made any contribution to discharging the liability. Some took advantage of the Bankruptcy Act, and though they later prospered greatly they offered him not one penny. He informed me, and I believe quite truthfully, that all his life he had been paying substantial interest on the principal sum plus insta1ments. Finally he discharged the debt, but that left him very little money, a fact which I unfortunately verified towards the close of his life when he became ill and I had to launch a modest rescue operation.
Bryant was a very competent barrister, but it was not long before I became critical of the way in which he answered interrogatories. I felt it was unnecessary for him to make some of the admissions which he made. I realise now how impertinent I was and I mention the fact for one reason only: that this was the first time in my life that I discovered an ability in myself to offer criticism of other people’s legal work. Whether the criticism was justified is a matter of no importance.
Bryant was a lover of the turf. Most of his bets were very small but he had acquaintances and friends who owned horses and he supported them to the tune of £5 or £10. This helped to forge a link between us because he speedily became acquainted with my affection for the turf.