IX edit
DISSOLUTION OF THE GROUP
Tension between natives and settlers, rising between 1837 and 1841, and culminating in the Layman affair, masked somewhat centrifugal forces in the Bussell family, but the final blow to the tribal autonomy of the blacks, given by the killing of Gaywal and the exile of his sons, set those forces free, and the dissolution of the group thereafter proceeded rapidly. The homestead at 'Cattle Chosen' gave place to the village of Busselton, its old sitting-room to the little church on the left bank of the Vasse. Financial and marital reasons caused the change.
When in 1829 emigration to the Swan was decided upon, it is doubtful if Mrs. Bussell thought of the family resources in terms of individual contributions, such as John's property, Mary's share, and so on. The habits of family life, the great risks jointly undertaken in making a start in a new world, naturally led her to regard the Pelican moneys as joint property, created for common ends by the forethought and saving of William Marchant Bussell, whom she still thought of as the head of the family. The prolonged and doubtful struggle at Augusta 'The Adelphi' and 'Cattle Chosen' maintained and emphasized this family solidarity.
At the Vasse, too, the menace of external danger reinforced it. It fitted well the modified communism of a pastoral life. Even property in land, when the principal source of income is cattle, may with advantage be held and tended in common. The division of tasks between herdsmen and cultivators, between stockmen and builders, does not need, and is not appreciably helped by several property in parcels of land. Up to 1837, therefore, the Bussells were better adapted to the task of colonization by reason of their family unity, and their lack of wives and children. Surveyor J. S. Roe assured them so, when they made their re-emigration to the Vasse. 'You are all very fortunate (though, doubtless, you are not of the same opinion) in not having any children to move along with you. But I cannot help wishing you all as much harm as amounts to this, that when you are well settled on your delightful tract of country, you will each take a husband or a wife, and perfect the character you all bear of being capital colonists, by creating more mouths to consume your produce.'
Opportunities to follow this advice were not plentiful to folk who were strict in their ideas of gentility and class, in a scattered colony with few means of transport. Long sea voyages helped. 'Holiday' visits to the capital town on the Swan, or to one another's homesteads, were almost as rare and significant as visits between European courts. At least, in their humble way, they led to similar results.
Mary Bussell was the first to marry. She 'broke the ice that has hitherto encrusted our impenetrable family', by accepting during a visit to Government House, Perth, Patrick Taylor, a young Englishman who had accompanied her mother and herself in the 'James Patterson'.
Miss Mary's pre-engagement opinion of 'this most excellent young man' had forewarned her English correspondents. Mr. Taylor, it appears, had thought of holy orders prior to his leaving England. 'He has his scruples', Mary believed, 'on the score of his health. How very much his character reminds us of you' — she Was writing to Capel Carter. 'If you knew him you would love him as dearly as we all do, if only for his veneration of our Johnnie. His feelings and plans are so romantically generous, while he imagines he is exempt from anything of the kind, conceiving himself to be an entirely matter-of-fact person. I have mentioned him often in my journal.' She had, every fourth line, on average. Early in 1837 Taylor visited 'Cattle Chosen'. Their engagement was announced shortly after Vernon, Mary and Fanny reached the Swan River in April of that year. In a letter to Sophie Hayward, in September '37, Fanny describes the wedding at Fre mantle. 'Mary has broken the ice... and is now a happy and blushing bride.... The Governor and all our Perth friends were anxious the marriage should take place during our stay in Government House, but neither Mr. Taylor nor Mary would consent to this plan until my mother's approbation. The very evening previous to our departure, letters arrived overland by the natives containing Mamma's consent, and it was determined that the nuptials should be celebrated without delay. We left Perth,* however, on the day appointed, and the ceremony took place at Fremantle, at the home of our kind friends the Bulls. The Governor came down to act as father. Mr. Mackie and Andrew Stirling were the only additions to the family party. We all assembled to dinner as if nothing were going to happen. Mary and myself, both dressed alike in white muslin, looked perhaps a little bridal. Perhaps, too, the challenges by the gentlemen that Miss Bussell and Miss Fanny should drink wine with them had a consciousness in their tone that we were Miss Bussell and Miss Fanny for the last time. The gentlemen were soon disturbed from their wine, and then, standing up before them all, the awful vow was pronounced. Andrew Stirling told me afterwards that Mary looked prettier than he ever saw her. I could not look at her, for I felt more agitated than I expected and should have broken down if the "obey" had not come out so boldly that even at that moment I smiled. Wine and wedding cake were then handed round, and, in the confusion of drinking healths, the bride and bridegroom slipped out of the room.'
* Perth is eleven miles up the Swan River above the port of Fremantle, at its mouth.
Mr. and Mrs. Taylor made a 'tedious but not unpleasant voyage of five days' — the phrase is Fanny's, who accompanied them — to King George's Sound, by the schooner 'Champion'. There they settled at Candyup, on the Kalgan River. Fanny thus enthuses over the property: 'The house is about a mile from the river, commanding a beautiful view of the Sound. The country is just now an exquisite green, and Candyup abounds in pretty grassy slopes covered with close fine sward. The cattle are looking extremely well, and when this house is plastered their sitting-room will be one of the best in the colony.'
Thence, in August '38, Mary wrote of her first-born, and of an incident of the day before its birth, very redolent of early colonial conditions. 'We had just finished our dinner and, for a wonder, had almost a clear larder, when the barking of the dogs announced an arrival. Looking through the windows we saw four persons coming up the valley. Who can it be ? I ran out to Mrs. Robinson to prepare her for guests, and returned in time to welcome Mr. Cheyne, Mr. Morley, Mr. Drake and the Doctor from the French whaler. They were all dreadfully tired and famished with hunger, having been lost in the bush since daylight, coming from Two People Bay, a distance of fourteen miles. I did the best for them that I could in the way of meals and shakes-down, but my arrangements gave me more trips up the ladder to our upper storey than I quite liked. When they took their leave of me next morning I certainly thought their backs were a cordial. The Frenchman, I am sure, expected I should have required his attendance before morning.
'The next day Missie came without any doctor, till she had lived and breathed for four hours. All the time I could spare from mending, etc., had been devoted to cutting and contriving for my expected treasure, but I imagined I had plenty of time and very leisurely picked things to pieces to turn them to best account, not finishing anything. So the little grub made her appearance very ill- provided for.... I could not but smile at the appearance of my first-born, no borders on her little caps than that formed by the hem, and left without a string. Patrick, as he kissed her little cheek, thought she looked like a brandy-faced fish wife that had had too much grog tea.... To-day she is ten weeks old, strong and healthful. She has no nourishment but what she receives from me.'
John Bussell's essays towards matrimony involved him in many adventures, both mental and bodily. He had formed the intention, even before leaving England, of returning to make Miss Sophie Hayward his wife. She was an orphan whose father had been a West Indian planter. They had been boy and girl sweethearts, but with the postponement of success in the colony, doubts beset Miss Hayward, and the correspondence between them seems to have passed through many lights and shades of understanding. One suspects an antipathy between Miss Hayward and Mrs. Bussell. The former demurred more than once at the prospect, as she deemed it, of not being mistress in her own house. Mrs. Bussell once speaks of her as 'the fickle Indian', and seems to show relief at a phase of estrangement. As early as November 1832 John was using every Byronic artifice of style and feeling to impress Miss Sophie with his determination to survive unbroken the loss of her affections. (See Appendix, J. G. B. to Sophie Hayward.) Letters continued to pass, and when in 1837 he at last set out for England the family were so confident of her return as his wife that Fanny makes her for the nonce, the recipient of the main home-letters, after news of Capel Carter's death. She writes as though Sophie were already a Bussell.
John's journey homeward was unusually prolonged. The vessel in which he embarked called at the Mauritius, and there John met with an accident, which detained him for several weeks. The sugar-ship in which he continued his journey met two mighty winter gales when beating round the Cape, and barely escaped foundering. She was deeply laden, as John told Lenox in a letter sent back from St. Helena, 'three narrow bend planks out of water, and as on every occasion we took water on deck, the lower plank of the bulwarks had been knocked out to let the sea off again with as little delay as possible. Off the Cape it is not long before a sea gets up. Three days out from Cape Natal the gale was tremendous. A sea struck the rudder, threw the man under the wheel, which wounded him on the arm and leg. He was brought below into the cabin, disabled. The storm continued to increase, and the glass indicated nothing favorable.... Just before daylight another sea struck her between the main and fore chains. The long boat, in a crack, was wrenched from the ring bolts, which were clean drawn out of the decks through the beams where they were rivetted. The boat, with the pinnace and the jolly-boat, went into the lee scuppers. All the coops and pig-styes were floated off, and the men were out of their depth on deck. This was the heaviest we had yet shipped. It was a clear moonlight night, and the sudden darkness that came over the bull's eyes with the rush of the water seemed to indicate that we were going down. Day dawned with no abatement. The steward went forward and discovered the head had been struck off, and was hanging by the bob-stays. The gammoning had gone, and the bowsprit was lifting up and down with the forestay. On the bowsprit depended the foremast, and on the foremast the main topmast. We waited in anxious anticipation for the fearful event of being dismasted where we could never hope for a fair wind to carry us to any port. The long-boat was secured to windward with tackles, that it might not carry away the stanchions. We were obliged to keep the ship south all that day and the following day lest the boats should make breach from their position. The wreck of the head was cut away, and a temporary but very inefficient gammoning contrived with a hawser run through the hawse holes, and over the bowsprit, having the ends brought to the windlass. That night the weather began to abate, but we were still hove to under close-reefed main topsail. The gale had now blown 48 hours.'
On the Monday the pumps were repaired, and it was 'compleat syrup' that was pumped out. Tuesday was nearly a calm, but with much swell.
'On the Monday night', John's letter continues, 'as we sat in the cabin various propositions were made for securing the bowsprit. It was decided that the carpenter should be lowered down to the water's edge, to cut a hole through the stem and reeve a chain through it. I who have cut a mortice and you well know how long on a fair bench a man would require to cut through a block of oak timber a foot thick, an eye large enough to receive some chain topsail sheets, three times doubled. But when the work must be done while the workman hung in a bowling, his tools out of order, the grindstone smashed, the stem vertical, the point to be worked upon below the convenient reach of his arms, while the ship was plunging up and down, so as to immerse the unfortunate wretch every five minutes overhead and ears, the difficulty appeared so great as to preclude all hope of success. It was at this point that my genius for expedients proved of avail, and I affirm that my simple suggestion was the means of saving us from inevitable destruction. I told them to send the carpenter down with a large auger, to drive a crowbar through the hole, and from that to make fast the bob-stays. The ruminations of the skipper during the night told him that it was the only means that could possibly be effected. Next morning before I came on deck the carpenter had driven through a small augur, preparatory to the one the size of the crowbar. This done, he came on deck in such a state of cold and exhaustion that I almost feared for the event; but after a good rubbing with dry towels, a dry flannel shirt, and a respite, he again set to work. In two hours the bar was driven through and before night the bowspirt was secure.'
But the respite was brief. 'The glass indicated another gale. As far as the ship went, we were pretty well prepared. The boats were so lashed as to be perfectly immovable. Captain Tomlin and I had persuaded the Captain of the vessel, Scott, to take some repose, and during that period had made a great clearance, throwing overboard much useless lumber. The compasses, to be sure, had all save one been broken, by a sea breaking over the stern, but we did not want them till we got fair weather. The leakage which had been very visible down the lazarette had taken up, and the boys alone were able to keep the ship clear. The worst of the business was that the crew were much fatigued; three including the man thrown down by the wheel were disabled.
'As the sun went down the wind rose and the sea was tremendous. Yet the ship in spite of her inordinate cargo rose like a duck. The view from her deck was singular enough. Had the outline been fixed one could not have conceived that water bounded the scene. Enormous undulations, smooth like chalk downs, came on one after the other, and glided under us, precluding us while we lay in the trough of the sea from the sight of anything but a few acres of smooth glassy hollows, streaked here and there with the foam of some wave that had topped and was again spread smooth. It looked like white sand-drift blown in among the vegetation on the downs of Australia. You have seen the sort of thing at the White Patch. When these masses of water got between us and the sun as it set, a green brilliant glare and transparency extended from the summits downwards to an extent that I could hardly have imagined.'
There, tantalizingly, the letter breaks off with the bare statement that on the second day of the renewed gale they lost their 'perfectly immovable' boats, and that despite John's genius for expedients and the carpenter's exertions, the masts had finally gone overboard. Ultimately, however, the vessel had arrived safely at St. Helena, though a 'compleat wreck, dismasted, and without boats'.
Reaching England in the autumn of 1837, John suffered a series of 'affliction, sickness and disappointment'.
The affliction was the news of Capel Carter's death from consumption, and her pecuniary ruin through a speculation in a Cornish mine. Capel Carter, the good fairy of our tale, was the daughter of William Marchant Bussell's sister Elizabeth Capel Bussell, who had married a Colonel Carter, stationed, at the time of Capel's birth, in Newfoundland. When quite a girl, she lost both parents, but they had made ample provision for her. For some years she lived with the Bussells, and on their setting out to Australia the boys had confidently expected that she would follow with their mother. Bitter was the disappointment when Mrs. Bussell and Mary arrived without her in 1834. She did them the utmost service in England, however. All wrote to her from Australia in terms of singular affection. She had shown strength of character in watching over the feckless William during the later years of his medical training, and soon developed the same skill and foresight as export agent to the colonists. Every requirement even hinted at in their letters she hastened to meet, and from more than one letter it is evident that she drew upon her own resources in doing so. They made her their usual channel of communication with the trustees. After Mrs. Bussell's arrival in Australia it was agreed that the capital invested in Consols might be laid out to better advantage and equal security in Australia. A power of attorney was therefore signed by all the beneficiaries, empowering her as their agent to release the trustees on the receipt of the money, and this instrument John carried with him. Its uselessness by reason of her death proved, as we shall see, a serious obstacle to some of his objects in visiting England.
She shared to the full John Bussell's deep sense of the importance of religion in the new community, and regretted the postponement of his ordination. One cannot repress the suspicion that she pictured him as Vicar of Augusta, and perhaps subsconciously allotted herself the role of his chief helper. More than once John, in writing to her, used such phrases as 'Oh Capel! Would that you were one of us!' Twice she offered to pay the expenses of John's return to England, stipulating on the first occasion, in 1834, that he should come for the express purpose of conducting her to the colony. On the second occasion John accepted the proferred aid. 'There is no one on earth', he told her when doing so, 'to whom I would so willingly owe an obligation as to yourself.' While delays still beset him she set about raising in England a fund 'for the erection of a church and parsonage at Augusta, Swan River, Western Australia' , and gathered two hundred and eighty pounds before her death. Twenty pounds of this came from Queen Adelaide, through the good offices of her godmother, Lady Elizabeth Capel, a Lady-in-waiting at the Court. Under the urgent persuasion of the Bussells she consented, now that Augusta was almost deserted, that the church should be built at Busselton. There it stands to-day a monument to her idealism and to her devotion to the distant settlement, raised largely by John Bussell's own hands, and for three decades the scene of his lay ministration.
To judge by the Bussells' letters, she was a beauty of that rare, unearthly brightness that moves pity and foreboding. A miniature of her, saved from the wreck of the 'Cumberland', drew from Fanny an expression of fear lest one so angelic in features could remain long on earth. She was already known to be ailing when John left Australia. Doubtless the glowing optimism with which she wrote of her financial prospects from the Cornish mine, in which she had ventured all her capital, had its origin in the well-known toxic stimulation of the victims of phthisis. As told above, John met on his arrival news of the mine's collapse and of her death some months before. The financial aid she had offered was therefore not forthcoming, and, to make matters worse, John found that during her last illness the family trustees had neglected the remittance of his mother's income, previously made through her. He induced them to set this right, but his own resources in England were very meagre. The plans he had formed of equipping 'Cattle Chosen' with a horse-driven flour mill, and of exporting English sheep were rejected as inadmissible by the trustees. 'I can touch none of our funded property', he reported 'so accurate and exact are the trustees, amongst whom Robert Yates appears the most timid. Our sheep affair still remains in doubt, there seems such fear among our enterprising sleeping partners.'
Hard on the heels of affliction came sickness and disappointment in the troubled course of his engagement to Sophie Hayward. On March 1838 he wrote to his mother: 'My affair with Sophie is at an end. We have had nothing but differences since my arrival. I was estranged at first by foolish jealousy of my affections for you, and lastly I objected to the reversion of her property, once willed to me, being, now that I had come for her, settled upon her brother. I have encountered distracting and humiliating scenes, and bear with her silly friends the character of a fortune hunter.' A later letter tells of his collapse in health after a date had actually been arranged for the marriage, and of his finally 'soliciting his freedom in plain terms', rather than 'come like a culprit to the halter'.
He went to recuperate from a nervous breakdown with John and Emily Bowker, his uncle and aunt, at Plymouth. There in July 1838 he met Charlotte Cookworthy, whom his mother had first known by her maiden name of Spicer. She was now a widow with three children, a boy, Spicer, and two girls, Frances and Emily. Within three weeks of their first meeting the young widow and John were engaged to be married. During the lifetime of her first husband, however, Mrs. Cookworthy had joined the Plymouth Brethren, with whose leading members, John, always a loyal Churchman, had been very plain-spoken in refusing 'conversion'. Charlotte had been guilty, he reported, of 'going to church once or twice, to the scandal of these celestial monopolizers. As she was a character well-known, you will not wonder that all threats, maledictions, excommunications were denounced upon the stray sheep that dared to love a wolf.' Some of the leading brethren, however, were the guardians of Charlotte's children, and pushed their opposition to the marriage to the length of denying her, should she marry John, either the custody of the children or the right to appoint their custodian. For a time John talked of going out to 'Cattle Chosen' with the mill and other things he had bought, winding up his affairs there, and returning to Charlotte in England. This she refused to countenance. They then decided to cut the Gordian knot by kidnapping the children. The agents of the 'Montreal', in which they took passage, allowed the ship to call at Plymouth, where the children were staying with the Bowkers. John and Charlotte Bussell embarked at Gravesend, and Miss Bowker brought the youngsters off so quietly when the ship anchored by the Hoe that old England was far on the lee before the guardians learnt of their going.
The coup cost Mrs. J. G. Bussell, for the time being, the loss of her children's patrimony. She was repaid, however, by her brother-in-law, Dr. Cookworthy, a legacy from her mother, amounting to six hundred pounds. This more than sufficed for John's purchases of better plant and stock for 'Cattle Chosen'.
At the Cape the 'Montreal' passengers met Sir James and Lady Stirling homeward bound from their fruitful service as founders of the Swan River Colony. Arrived at Fremantle, John hired a half-decked cargo boat to take his wife, her children, a young man Lawson, seeking colonial experience, and their goods and chattels to the Vasse. The hire of the boat — the 'Victoria' — was £60.*
* He afterwards bought her, to provide the farm with cheaper transport to and from Fremantle, but lost her on her second voyage.
A gale of wind drove the little vessel in twenty-four hours down to Geographe Bay, where at the Tub beacon, the scene of the landing in 1834, the first to meet them as they landed was Henry Ommaney, who during John's stay in England had married Bessie.†
† In Fanny Bussell's diary for 12th May 1840, the entry records:
- 'Bessie's confinement took place. Her dear little boy struggled into existence. Everyone much engaged with Bessie.'
To one at 'Cattle Chosen' the return of the wanderer brought a disappointment. After reaching England John had been the recipient of authority from Charles to urge his suit with a Miss Elgie.
'What a sly old rascal you are', replied John. 'Why did you not mention to me what you had done wifeward? But I have forgiven you and have been making love for you, et militavi non sine gloria'. Charles, however, had counted on either the generosity of Capel or the family capital to provide Miss Elgie's outfit and passage. As these resources failed, and the lady could not replace them from her own, she was unable to accompany Charlotte and John. It was Charles's one vicarious romance. He died unmarried.*
* In the letter from Perth, on his stammering, quoted in an earlier chapter, he wrote: 'I am literally sighing for the greenwood shade, a sight of the cows, the horses, the goats and all the many appendages of a happy, if I may not say comfortable, home. There shall I end my days, and if I can contrive to get one congenial spirit who will bear this bane of my existence, and who will accept in return all the affection that the heart can offer. But what egotism! I was led into this last observation by the reflection that our own girls in the common course of things must shortly get married, and by the idea of returning to the glorious disorders of a bachelor's life.'
Fanny, Vernon and Alfred did not marry until a period later than that of this story. Fanny had, she told John, 'refused to strike her colours' during the visit to Swan River in 1837. Vernon, in November 1835, had commissioned Captain Tobin to bespeak a wife for him during a voyage to England.
'I will give you a description of what she ought to be. In the first place she must not be small nor very tall, accomplished but not blue. You will have Capel to give you a helping hand, and between you will make a good choice. The difficulty will be to induce her to put her dear little foot on ship-board. I depend entirely on you for prepossessing her in may favour, and for a general description of my personal perfections. Will it be possible to bring her straight to the Vasse? It would not be safe to land her at the Swan. Fanny recommends heading her up in a cask, and putting her down in the hold. If you follow this latter plan, you must not un-cooper it too often, for fear of the susceptibility of your heart. But remember, this is not fun. It is the only chance a poor fellow has.'
Marriage inevitably raised the question of the shares in the common income which should fall to the various members. A series of discussions brought the problem to a head early in 1841, all the Bussell brothers (save Lenox, who was now insane) and their brothers-in-law, Taylor and Ommaney, taking part. In Fanny's dairy for 28th January is this note: 'A committee assembled in the new room to discuss matters of vast importance to the firm of "Cattle Chosen". Employments suspended.' For several succeeding days entries appear, characterizing the discussions as they proceed as 'unpleasant'. We can only guess at their trend, but evidently the crux was whether the contributions made by each member to the establishment of the farm had been invested in a partnership, or lent to an imaginary corporate body with the right to draw interest, and eventually to withdraw the capital. Judging by a heated letter addressed by John to Patrick Taylor (3rd ii, '41), the second view, giving the withdrawing members the status of debenture holders, at first prevailed. John, backed up by Vernon, objected that inactive creditors should have no right to live on the produce of the firm, as in fact they had done, at the period of most ruinous expense. 'My dear Taylor', he wrote, 'it has come to this I fear, that an eternal separation must take place. You will look upon your brothers as fraudulently swindling your wife's money; we, on our sisters, as deniers of value received, usurers who would have driven us to the jail door either for the paltry gratification of afterwards exhibiting an offensive generosity, or for the pelf in a more substantial light.' He then set forth the rival views as he saw them, concluding: 'And now, my dear Taylor, farewell. I feel that I am thus addressing you for the last time. There are few with whom I have been so shortly acquainted that I have deemed, so much allied with me in general sentiment; but circumstances seem to decide that we are not to be friends.'
The acrimony of the contest arose, perhaps, from a sense, most vivid in the mind that had borne the chief brunt of anxiety in the years of apparent failure, that it was pitiless, to the point of greed, to apply the cold calculus of interest due, between members of a family, and to tot up in monetary value the services which a compact group of pioneers in a savage forest had rendered one another. At the instance of the clear-sighted Charles friendlier counsels prevailed. For a decade after 1841 the 'firm of "Cattle Chosen"', or, more formally, Bussell Brothers, continues to operate the joint estate of 5,573 acres, as a unity.* The plan agreed upon was drawn up by Charles:
* Though official correspondence with the Surveyor-General had established their right to a grant of 3,700 acres on the Vasse as early as 1832, the Crown Grant of Sussex, Location 1 was issued, to John, Charles, Vernon and Alfred only on 16th November 1841. The area, though large to English eyes, was not large in the Swan River Colony, where the average holding of the first settlers was 4,000 acres, and where 5,524,000 acres had been alienated by 1838, 2,032 acres for every man in the colony!
'Admitting that the estate returned 8oo per annum clear profit, the following proposals are submitted to the members:
'First, that John be paid all sums introduced by him into the establishment, deduction being made for the house in which he resides:
'Second, that one-fifth share of all the profits be reserved and sold until all publick† debts be liquidated, and afterwards for purchase of implements, improvements to stock, and improvements generally:
† i.e. joint. Cf. 'publick time ' at 'The Adelphi'.
'Thirdly, that a dairy be built immediately and that Fanny be made the superintendent, receiving a percentage on the bona-fide profits:
'Fourth, that an account be kept of the work done by the partners, and that they be all credited when employed for the benefit of the establishment:
'Fifth, that it is unbecoming that Fanny should have the charge of Lenox:
'Sixth, that in the event of my mother and Fanny deciding on living separately (i.e. apart from John and Charlotte), they have a servant who shall supply their wants and attend to Lenox,* Since my conversation with John, I should be inclined to add "at the cost of such of the partners as agree in the opinion expressed in proposition five":
* Mrs. F. L. Bussell died on 26th June 1845, and Lenox a week later, on 3rd July.
'Seven, that Mother and Fanny have the parlour, kitchen and two bedrooms for their own:
'Eight, that all other buildings are the property of the partners:
'Ninth, that the present stock and stock-in-trade be considered the invested capital:
'Tenth, that the produce be divided amongst the partners, one-fifth being reserved as aforesaid:
'Eleventh, the like with regard to crops:
'Twelfth, that in the event of any of the partners desiring to retain any portion of the stock falling to their share, they be branded accordingly, and that they pay the firm a weekly stipend for care and superintendence.'
It was well for the Bussells that their joint property found them in most of the necessaries of life. In the early 'forties their Swan River market for surplus stock slumped badly, and they received a serious setback in monetary income from England. Their chief trustee, Captain Yates, had fallen into devious ways after Capel Carter's death, and John's return to Australia. During 1840 he talked of emigrating to the Vasse, where John purchased land and set about building a house for him. In 1841 he changed his plans and entertained the idea of migrating to New Zealand. Meantime he failed again to remit Mrs. Bussell's income and put obstacles in the way of the Bussells' project of transferring their capital to Australia. John's letters to him during this year contain no suspicion that anything was wrong. In commenting on Captain Yates's change of plans he voices the general hostility of Swan River settlers to the Wakefield system of sale of colonial lands at a 'sufficient price'. 'My regrets', at the Captain's decision not to come to Australia 'are somewhat lessened by other considerations. In my opinion, for some years the progress of Australia must be checked by the new regulations* that the Whigs in their wisdom have established. The prices fixed on land surpass the interest that land will yield, and I see little prospect for adventurers of the present day. What New Zealand may offer, I know not. But beware of the swindlers of the day. Suspect where you see the name of a Wakefield or a Company. Let the fate of South Australia, and the thousands plunged into distress and ruin there, prevent anything less than certainty from actuating you, who sway the fortunes of so many dear to your affectionate J. G. Bussell.'
* Substituting, in W.A. sale of public lands at 5s. an acre for the older policy of grants in proportion to the settler's capital.
Early in 1842, however, the stoppage of remittances had continued for eighteen months, and had exhausted John's expedients in raising money locally, and his ingenuity in imagining possible causes of delay. The slump in the price of stock had made his need of the cash acute. 'If we do not hear something promising by the next ship', he told Yates, 'we shall be obliged to sell off the greater part of our stock, and I see no exit from difficulty amounting to want,'
The family had in 1840 once more completed in full legal form a power of attorney authorizing the trustees to realize the funded property in England, and to forward the proceeds to the Swan River. They were now amazed to receive from Captain Yates, a statement claiming for himself not only the repayment of £300 they had spent on his behalf at the Vasse, on a house and land, but a further £387, representing a debt of £51 6s. 10d. 'strangely swelled by interest', which Yates alleged had been owed to him by their father, W. M. Bussell. Personal protests to Yates were unavailing. The debt, John told him, 'was at the time of the subscription given as a reason for the absence of a contribution on your part, and may therefore be supposed to have yielded profit to the amount which would have been contributed.' Threats of legal proceedings proved equally vain. Only the balance of the trust money was remitted to Australia.
Simultaneously with this unseemly severance of the last material tie between the Bussells and their Hampshire home there came, as an outcome of Capel Carter's last effort on their behalf, an unfailing means of spiritual communion with England, the building of a little church by the Vasse. In addition to Capel Carter's fund, which was remitted in 1842, John Bussell's Oxford contemporaries, Wells and Selwyn, presented windows, said to have been duplicates of those in Trinity College Chapel. All the settlers near Busselton helped to quarry or cart timber. George Blechynden, the village carpenter, gave his labour for some months. The Rev. John Wollaston of Leschenault and John Bussell designed the building between them, taking Winchester College Chapel as their model. John also helped Dawson and Balchin to saw the timber, and worked on the walls and roof with Blechynden. 'I well remember', wrote his daughter, Mrs. Elizabeth Capel Brockman, of her babyhood, 'going to the sawpits about a mile and a half up the river from "Cattle Chosen", and seeing father chalking out the pieces of timber before cutting them. He was pit-sawyer, which was the most unpleasant place, as the sawdust is blinding in the eyes. My father contrived a long narrow piece of glass enclosed around the edges with leather, and tied at the back of his head, as a protection for his eyes. Day after day he worked there with untiring energy, and superintended the building of the church until it was flnished.'*
* The church owed nothing to convict labour, by which it is erroneously said to have been built, in The Australasian of 7th February 1926. Convicts were not brought to the Swan River until several years after its completion.
The dedication of the church, by the Reverend John Wollaston in 1843, marked the realization of the Bussells' ambition, to plant in the wilds of Western Australia an English village. That done their energies strangely flagged. Even the manor house, if so we may describe 'Cattle Chosen', remained unfinished. A new wing planned for Charlotte Bussell is to this day a thing of heavy stone foundations and walls only half begun. After the discussions about the basis of partnership, John went church-building, and thereafter he explored the Blackwood River. One of its best diorite valleys, Balingup, attracted his eye for good country. He compared it with some of the Peak country in Derbyshire, which he had known as an undergraduate. Lack of resources probably prevented his taking it up as a sheep run, and he remained a village dignitary by the quiet, self-sufficient Vasse.† There the pioneer generation and their children lived their pleasant lives on the edge of the forest, much as English villagers in the southern counties must have done for centuries, before railways came. Unluckily, John left no son, and twice during the nineteenth century, once in the early 'fifties and again in the 'nineties, many of the younger men of other families left the village to follow the hunt for gold. In the rest of the colony, convicts came and went. The pastures round the village and through its wide streets changed in character with the coming of Indian couch grass and Cape weed. But Busselton dreamed on, aloof, a survival of the free colony Sir James Stirling had planned, a Tory village looking up to Colonel Molloy and John Bussell, as to the squire and the parson. John, indeed, was never ordained, though a visit of the Bishop of South Australia in the middle 'forties led him to undertake again his theological studies, to that end. It seems that ordination would have deprived him of his magistracy, in which he continued active and fearless. He conducted, nevertheless, the services in the village church, until his death in 1875. Many still remember him of a Sunday morning rowing down the little river from 'Cattle Chosen', and taking from a linen bag that hung in the chancel, his old gown and Bachelor's hood, which he would swing over his shoulders with a quick turn of the wrists. Then, running both hands through his hair, he would step rather briskly up the aisle, to read the old service and the lessons for the day, an
† See Appendix, p. 179, for Mrs. J. G. Bussell's description of a N.S. Wales sheep station, evidently intended to press upon John the project of keeping sheep on a bigger scale.
* Introduced by Charles Bussell at Sandilands.
':"Oxford scholar poor,
- Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain
- Who, tired of knocking at preferment's door,
- One summer morn forsook his friends
- And went to learn the gypsy lore;
- And roamed the world with that wild brotherhood,
- And came, as most men deemed, to little good,
- But came to Oxford and his friends no more.'*
* Once only did he leave the Vasse for a prolonged period, viz. in 1862, when at the instance of Bishop Hale (who had married Sabina Molloy, of Augusta and Busselton), he went to Perth and taught the classics for two years at the High School, in place of the Revd. Sweetings, who had accepted the cure of souls at Guildford.
No doubt the planting of an English Tory village, of the quiet stock-raising and agricultural type, in the South West corner of Australia, was a limited, perhaps a dull achievement:
- 'It was not much! But we who know
- The strange capricious land they trod —
- At times a stricken, parching sod,
- At times with raging floods beset —
- Through which they found their lonely way,
- Are quite content that you should say
- It was not much!'
A hundred years later men are again girding their strength to attack the settlement of the timbered lands in that corner of Australia. The climate and environment promise the victors, when they come, a land worthy of the physique and spirit its conquest evokes. They are setting out from the bases the Bussells made for them, Augusta and 'Cattle Chosen'.