William Lane as “Sketcher” in the Brisbanepress

1885-1887

(a) The articles

On Wednesday the 22nd of July 1885, in the Brisbane Courier, onthe same page as a regular reporting of the Gospel TemperanceMission, appeared an unsigned article on a meeting held by avisiting anti-alcohol campaigner from the United States, entitled“A Night with Booth: a Sketch.”1 From the tenor of this, and ofa subsequent “sketch” on the same subject, in the same paper, twoweeks later, plus a third three days after that, this last beingsigned “Sketcher”, there can be little doubt that this firstarticle, significantly devoted to the fight against alcoholism,was the beginning of William Lane’s pseudonymous career as“Sketcher”.2

1 The same article, interspersed with headings, appeared in the Daily Observer, eveningsister paper to the Brisbane Courier, later in the day.2 This, of course, was not about William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army who,although an active anti-alcohol campaigner, never visited Australia, but rather theextremely in-vogue but since altogether forgotten Richard T. Booth, “a reformeddrunkard and self-appointed temperance missionary”, whose influence in the 1880’s inEngland was as vast as it was contested. He introduced what was to become identifiedas an American style of campaign, based on area-targetting, careful pre-organization,massed choirs, and the manoeuvering of local clerics into tacit and/or active support.The emphasis of the meetings, to the shock of established movements, was on masspledging, and a general good time. Booth is said to have emigrated to New Zealand in1886, where he became an insurance agent. (See Lilian Lewis Shiman: Crusade against Drimkin Victorian England, Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1988, pp.112-120. Interestinglyenough, although he is considered to have been an important influence in England andNew Zealand, there is no mention in this work of his impact on Australia, where he issaid to have travelled, again “scandalously”, as much for holidays as for missionwork.) An article in the Brisbane Courier of July 18th 1885 purported him to be theauthor of over 1,000,000conversions, and notes that he had begun his Australasiancampaign in Melbourne some 18 months before, where 23,000 took the pledge, followed bya further 600 in Tasmania. Sydney followed - an apparently less spectacular success -and until recently he had been recuperating from his labours with his family atBowral, from whence he had continued his mission in New Zealand, and now Brisbane.

Interestingly enough, the first of these three articlesappeared just three weeks after Lane’s arrival in Brisbane, and afew days after “Lucinda Sharpe” first article in the QueenslandFigaro, testimony to Lane’s energy and networking talents.

In its mixture of the simple language of popular demagogy, andthe tenuous majesty of alliteration; in its flowing, almostrepetitive style, counter-balanced by sharp caricatures touchingon the Dickens or the Daumier; and in its impeccableconstruction, leading from the riverine description of theflocking throng, through the ordinary goings-on of anorchestrated salvation, to the charisma of Booth, and ending inthe not-quite magic of the taking of the pledge, this openingsalvo of Lane’s is a minor masterpiece of descriptive journalism,in which the believer cohabits with the cynic, the flatterer ofpublic taste with the social satirist. On the 22nd of July 1885,Brisbane discovered it had a journalist of genius in its midst;and that journalist, whilst laying out his talents before apublic that was going to follow him avidly for the next sevenyears, managed at the same time to hedge his bets, and test thewind.

And we cannot help but be struck by the fact that Lane’s careerbegins with the description of a man who “drew”:

..he impresses one as a man who - Republican to thecore - would crack a joke with an emperor or hobnobwith the poorest labourer... who speaks to you andme in words that you and I can understand - aspeaker who never halts, never wants for a word; ascene-painter who never misses a point or dwarfs thecentral idea; a nervous man, who talks as he feels,whose magnetic strength is in that very nervousweakness which ignites him to excitable women andsensitive men. He is not an orator; he can neverdream of attaining the heights from which genius

sways the reason of men, but he touches the heart,and that is all he wants to do.

Lane himself will dream of these heights, will attain them, willsway and touch with his magnetism; and at the apex of hisinfluence, with his band of believers, in isolation in SouthAmerica, will eventually see alcohol - or his unbending attitudeto it - divide his community and herald the failure of his dream.If, on the one hand, it is a significant irony that the alcoholquestion should be at the beginning and the end of his Australiancareer, it is much less ambiguously meaningful that a career thatwill lead to an almost messianic destiny, should begin with the -perhaps, in hind-sight, rivalrous - description of a fellow-spirit, a crusader, a precursor.

The second article, “A Testimony Meeting: a Sketch”, publishedin the Courier on August the 4th (and in the Daily Observer in theevening), is a quite different affair: here satire verges onsarcasm, admiration on scorn. Instead of the majesty of a rollingconvergent structure, Lane is as hotchpotch as Booth himself hadbeen impromptu. What had been intended as a meeting at whichBooth would preside the speeches of local organisers - presumablyto begin the management of an on-going crusade where he would nolonger be present - became, in Lane’s account, a shabby attemptby an old stager to patch up the inadequacies of his helpers, anad lib/ad hoc exercise that exposed the tricks of trade of theexperienced campaigner. The article begins with a cruelhumour, comparing the falling-off in attendance to a short-changeglass of beer:

It was in the ‘long sleevers’ when the froth hasdeparted - half-full; no amount of shaking andspreading out could make it more;

and ending with a similar unkindness, addressed at the herohimself, when “the magnetism of his thrilling and eloquent voice”was lost by an attempted upstaging:

the curtain could not have been rung down moreopportunely than when the revival had revived andmen’s hearts beat responsively to the thoughts ofanother... But Booth is mortal when all’s said anddone. It was but natural that he should feel badlyat having his climax ‘anti-ed’ by another’stestimony.

This sudden change of tone from one article to the nextsupposes more than a simple disappointment in the conduct of ameeting: the Courier had previously been roundly taken to task byBooth for a deprecatory editorial that appeared immediately afterhis arrival, claiming, notably, that by attacking drink insteadof drunkenness, the mission was liable to create more harm thangood. And although Lane doesn’t address the question of alcoholitself - he is, after all, a ‘sketcher’ - the trick of comparingthe meeting to a glass of beer smacks strongly of the scorningattitudes of the Courier editorialist laughing at “the requiredstate of frenzy - the mentalintoxication” and “the period of pleasing exaltation of spirits -an ecstatic mental delirium” the Booth mission was expected toengender.3

And, although done in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, the article isalso noteworthy for the first appearance, at this early stage, ofwhat was later to be a modus operandi for Lane the journalist, asfor Lane the activist - class consciousness:

there were mechanics, artificers, and labourers,their wives, their sisters, and their sweethearts,on the other side of the barrier, which told howeven the blue ribbon distinguishes between thericher and the poorer, and set one wondering if inthe heaven the lecturer spoke of there was one placefor those who wore white shirts, and another forthose who didn’t.

3 Brisbane Brisbane Courier / Daily Observer, Monday 20th July 1885.

Lloyd Ross, as yet Lane’s sole biographer, claimed that Lane’s“reports” of Booth’s lectures had been declared by themissionary’s agent “to be the finest reports that they hadreceived in any part of the world, and ordered some thousandcopies of the paper for propaganda purposes”. Ross also recordsthat “some months later the temperance agitators in Brisbaneprotested to the editor against the critical report given ofanother of their lectures, and were astonished to learn that thishad also been written by Lane!”4 In any event, a third article5

appeared just three days after the offending one, and as if toretrieve the situation, and perhaps under instruction, Lane ishere at pains to reproduce Booth’s address point by point, to theexclusion of commentary, unless it be extolatory:

From the moment that he told of his mother’s words, thesacred fire of oratory seemed to fall upon the speaker.(….) He spoke as he had never spoken in Brisbanebefore (….) He had only been a raconteur, a story teller,he had rarely, if ever, verged upon oratory, but lastnight that which is the noblest gift of God was uponhim and made him great. In his eyes blazed the divinefire...

This long article, “Booth as a Boy in Blue”,6 is significantnot only in its return to the awe of demagogy and its revisionistquality - it is not entirely exempt from satire in itsrepresentation of the defile of Brisbane notables, in its notingthe absence of the working class and the overwhelming presence of4 Lloyd Ross: op. cit., p.34. In fact, barely two weeks separate these two articles.There do not appear to be any published criticisms of the second of them, although agood few letters were published on the temperance mission in the pages of the BrisbaneCourier at that time. 5 It is possible that Lane had authored another article published a day before this one, in the Observer. (See below, note 9.)6 Brisbane Courier, Friday 7th August, 1885; Daily Observer, same date. The meeting in whichBooth told the story of his life had been held almost three weeks before, on the 20th

of July, and Lane missed a golden chance for irony that the more formal report of themeeting in the Courier managed in its own way to convey: “The Chairman had not the leasthesitation in stating they had before them one of the most gifted men of the century.(Applause.) He met Mr. Booth ten minutes ago…”

those who came “to be pleased, not to be converted” - but alsofor its being the first article to be signed “Sketcher”, Lane’scoming-out, even if in masquerade.

I will have much to say on pseudonymity throughout this work -it is central to our analysis; for the time being I shall contentmyself with noting that Lane changed from publishing unsignedarticles, to ones signed “Sketcher” on the 7th of August 1885,and that this pen-name appears to have issued consequentiallyfrom the nature of the articles, and their preceding titles. Notto sign articles would appear to construe their unimportance, onthe one hand, and their over-importance on the other;furthermore, between the unsigned and the pseudonymous, thismatter of importance becomes paramount, simply for the attempt tocreate a following, if not to defend one’s privacy, status, andprofessional integrity. By becoming Sketcher, Lane becomes some-one, identified with the text he recognises as his own. There isat one and the same time a mutation on a personal and aprofessional level: Lane assumes paternity of his creations, bothto encourage a following, and to become, albeit in the shadows,himself. This, of course, was no new or mysterious procedure:there were, at that time, only a small number of journalistssigning their articles in the Courier, or indeed in any newspaperin Brisbane (as, perhaps for the rest of Australia, or Britain,for that matter), and of these, in the Courier for example, mostwere pseudonymous, except for some politicians, letter-writers,and the specifically literary figures, self-styled or otherwise.

We can nevertheless note a rite of passage here, and note thatit is simultaneous with a diplomatic revision of style, anassertion that the capacity to move people’s minds is of divineorigin, and the germination of an obsession with the tears andsuffering of women (especially in motherhood), nowhere morehermaphroditic than this:

He had made men womanly before, but then it was for thesorrow and the misery of drink and sin; he made menwomanly last night. Why have hardened adventurers weptat the sight of a little flower? Why does one’s heartweep and feel sad when it nestles closest to the loveof another? Why does the young mother weep for loveover her new-born babe? Answer these and you will knowhow oratory moves the minds of men, why Booth lastnight drew tears from those who knew not why theywept.7

Booth departed Brisbane soon after, and was succeeded by a Mrs.Leavitt, an organizer of the Women’s Christian Temperance Unionin the United States.8 On September the 1st, the Courier publisheda final Sketcher article on the crusade, under the title “ATemperance Fizzle”9: “It may be that R. T. Booth had run like apatent reaper and binder through the temperance harvest,” saysLane of the poor turn-out, “and left nothing for the gleaner whofollows wearily in his tracks”, and then proceeds to paint aportrait of a woman lacking in skill, style and oratory, whononetheless had charms he condescendingly grants - “she is acomely woman, is Mrs. Mary J. Leavitt, a woman who, when a Yankee‘schoolmarm’, must had half the district youth at her feet”.Mindful nonetheless of the message - Mrs. Leavitt clearly sawalcoholism as one of the degenerate results of the Civil War -

7 The association of the spilling of tears with a crossing of gender is a convention ofthe age, and a component of many an authoritarian society. In Lane, it is a repeatedleit-motif, shared with his well-loved Ouida, herself given to a certain literarytransvestism: “…the Seraph, with no eyes on him, bowed down his head upon his armswhere he leaned against the marble table, and, for the first time in his life, feltthe hot tears roll down his face like rain, as the weakness of woman [i.e., crying]unmanned him…” (Under Two Flags, op. cit., p. 135.)8 Mrs. Leavitt stayed from the 28th of August to the 6th of December, during which timeshe claimed to have “administered about 1000 pledges … and established five ChristianWomen’s Temperance Unions.” Next on her itinerary were to be Sydney, Victoria, SouthAustralia, China, Japan, India, Cape Colony and England. (See the Brisbane Courier, Sat.5th December 1885.)9 Brisbane Courier, Tuesday September the 1st 1885; Daily Observer, same date, with “Mrs.Leavitt’s Mission” added to the title.

Lane wants to serve both as a recorder, and as a satirist with agift for the burlesque:

[The choir’s] singing came in handily while Mr. PeterMcLean was reading a psalm, for at that junction thecornet of the Salvation Army sounded loudly from thestreet. The cornet, the singing of a doggerel hymn,and the clatter which always attends such guerrillareligion forced Mr. McLean to take refuge behindanother hymn. Messrs. Fullwood and Steele were theonly occupants of the front platform chairs, the lattersitting out at the wing and leading the applause withthe skill of a claqueur, and a persistency worthy of abetter opportunity.

After this article, the Sketcher column disappears from thepages of the Courier for three months,10 to reappear in the Tuesdayedition of the 8th of December in the first of a series announcedas “Brisbane Saturday Nights”:

“This is Australia,” I [said] obstinately; “the shadowof romance [is] still in London, but here everything isnew, everything is prosaic and matter-of-fact. Justimagine Dickens trying to write of Brisbane life; hewould break down in the first chapter if he didn’t fallback on the sensational.”

10 It is possible, however, that the unsigned “Sketches of our Street Arabs”in the Observer of Thursday the 8th October was Lane’s work. Although it bearsfew of the hallmarks of his later writing, and the treatment of dialogue bydirect transcription is unusual in his work, we cannot ignore the significanceof the title, nor the general method of treatment of a subject that wouldbecome typical for Sketcher. In addition, “the writer”, as he addresseshimself, accompanies a detective into the home of a young larrikin - apursuance technique soon to be taken up by Sketcher - where he witnessesscenes that are believably the context described in a later Sketcher article(“Bill’s Unhappy Home”, Brisbane Brisbane Courier/Daily Observer, 3rd February 1886.)The article is written in as straightforward and factual a style as thesubject admits, replete with figures and an explanation of the Melbourneorigin of the word “larrikin”, and ends with prolonged reference to the workof the Salvation Army and the YMCA.

“Would he!” said the editor, as he finished his cigarand rose to go. “I tell you that the kaleidoscope is asinexhaustible in Brisbane as it is in London, andwhat’s more, I’ll prove it. Come down to the street,choose a passer-by and trail him. Pick haphazard andyou’ll get a readable article, sure...11

Inexhaustible it would not prove to be. Lane wrote ten sucharticles, beginning at the door of the Courier office in QueenStreet, eyeing the Albert Street corner, watching the flow ofpeople of a Saturday night, particularly animated by thedisgorging of the Australian and Globe Hotels; the articlesappeared weekly until the following February, skipping only theChristmas-New Year week, and by the time he got to the ninth andlast, the subject had become tired and ordinary, and had aspredicted only kept its head above water by pandering to the loveof the sensational. Lane seemed to have been right, and hiseditor wrong. Or he had not been up to the task.

11 A more likely origin of the series is to be found in the unsigned articlein the Observer three months earlier, entitled “Saturday Night Scene” (Monday3rd August 1885, Observer only), in which the author begins a journey throughthe centre of Brisbane using Queen Street as a starting-point, and describingthe variety of individuals and night commerces to be seen. Whilst thisarticle shows few of the trade marks of the “Sketcher” style - with thepossible exception of the ebb-and-flow descriptions of the crowd movements -it is nonetheless conceivably his work. Many of the subjects of laterarticles - larrikins, drunks, prostitutes - are present, and the articleconcludes with a long description of a revivalist temperance speaker, followedby an equally long interview with him about the ‘saved’, police laxity, andthe misunderstanding which his mission - based in New Zealand - had sufferedin the press and the public in Queensland. A passably Laneian conclusion -“the great human tide had ebbed” - rounds out the piece.If indeed this was by Lane, it would constitute his second ‘known’ piece forthe Brisbane Brisbane Courier/Daily Observer group, appearing two weeks after his first‘Booth’ article, and a day before the second - also the last of his unsignedpieces in what would become the “Sketcher” format. We can conclude, then:that if the Booth articles were the genesis of Sketcher’s career, the idea ofa punctual series on Brisbane was already in gestation at this early time; andthat the Observer was somewhat the ground for experiments in style, tone andsubject for Lane which would later become “officialised” in the (presumably)more respectable morning paper.

His first passer-by was a couple that he purported to follow tothe theatre, witnessing their reactions to the play, thenfollowing them to her doorstep, where they acted out herreluctance and his disappointment. She “not exactly a prettyface... [but] with all the innocent aids of blossoming girlhood”;he “a prim young fellow...happily ignorant of the... mysteriesthat go to make up the far-famed lines of beauty (….) with theproud self-esteem of a man that has seen the footlights thrice ina lifetime”. Lightly laughing at the young girl’s timidprudery, and lampooning the man’s pretentiousness, unfortunately,leads more to condescension than satire in Lane’s treatment, andis patently a platform for his own rather self-satisfiedobservations on the play. However, a passable bridge to thelover’s lane scene is wound out of a strand of self-satire: “Isaw it all as I glided towards Petrie’s Bight - reporters always‘glide’...”; suddenly the suitor’s attempts to win favours of hiscompany founder on the unfortunate way his phrases echo theplatitudes of the play’s comic relief, and, as his zeal turns tohumiliation, so does her good humour turn to anger at being“expected to marry for a third-class seat at the theatre”. Shethrows him down his three shillings and turns heel, he curses anddoes likewise, and the gliding reporter makes good of the changeto buy oranges and sheep’s trotters.12

Other than setting the stage for the series, this first articleprovides Lane with a forum to begin his life-long exploration of

12 This first of a new series had the good fortune - or good sense - to createa tiny stir, exploited (invented?) in the following day’s Brisbane Courier: “‘Onewho Knows’ writes to us as follows:- “I find under the heading of BrisbaneSaturday Nights by ‘Sketcher’, that one of Grimes and Petty’s young ladies hasbeen watched very carefully. I beg to state that the said young lady is notone of their assistants, as they are far above behaving in such a manner asyou described.” Our correspondant is mistaken. The ‘Grimes and Petty’ of ourcontributor is graced by the presence of the young lady on whose courtship heintruded in such an unwarrantable manner. But then, possibly, ourcorrespondant is not acquainted with the firm in question, of which only theshadow or ‘double’ carries on business in Queen-street, the real establishmentbeing in the town of Weissnichtwo...”

the relationship between the sexes, bound, even at this formativetime, by the homily expressed as certainty, by the apparentintimate conviction that others don't see clearly enough what hesees, especially in the personal access that he seems to believehimself to have into the soul of women:

He was evidently no young roué; was not posted on thepeculiarities of a woman’s soul, and did not know thatthough it is pliable as wax before the swaying wand ofOrpheus, it is only so because the genius of musicspeaks to the heart. I wanted to tell him that when awoman laughs she is pitiless...

Collating Lane’s almost countless epithets on women, most ofwhich appear, at least on the conscious level, to be coming froma place of respect, awe and admiration, analysing them,understanding, if possible, the theory of the feminine of thismost gynocentric of commentators, cannot but be a major on-goingtask of this work. And here, in this first foray of Sketcherinto the night-life of Brisbane, we meet a woman who, in spite ofher “non-descript face, with a non-descript nose, and the mostordinary sort of brown eyes, but with a rounded chin, a pair offull lips, and a complexion clear as an English girl’s alwaysis”, can bring a man to “the delirium stage of love’s fever”, andthen control him totally for his (and, of course, Lane’s)generalising: “You girls are all alike; you are all heartlesscoquettes (….) Adolphuses always think the whole sex is bound upin their adored one”, by reverting to “being cool and collected,as women are in verbal emergencies”; who can, as a shopassistant, be “rapt with the exertion required to prove thedearest lace the cheapest, or flushed with triumph at havingdisposed of some of last year’s stock”, and yet be “all aglowwith unalloyed and innocent delight”.13

13 Brisbane Brisbane Courier/Daily Observer Tuesday 8th December, 1885. The Observer gave thearticle a sub-title - a practice it was to continue - “After the Races”, and had itwritten by “Sketcher in the Brisbane Courier”.

For the second “Saturday Night”, Lane refined the structure ofthe first into a form that would persist for the next four: thebackdrop and choosing of a subject; following the person, up tothe arrival at a fixed place; the scene of that place, both inthe descriptive and active senses of the word; and a conclusion,usually with a moral. And throughout, the development of athesis, introduced at the beginning, and clinched at the end.Here the backdrop, as usual, is a lively Queen Street, itshotels, its patrons, and its barmaids, with a particular emphasison its having been a race day, and the accompanying“Bacchanalia”. This was Brisbane before the depression of theNineties, in the eyes of a newcomer:

through open doors and windows one caught a glimpse ofcrowded hats, with beyond the gleaming bar and the darkhair of barmaids and foaming glasses lifted up onhigh... Squatters and “spielers” rubbed shoulders,merchants and clerks fraternised for once, mechanicsand shopmen forgot their feud, and were hail-fellow-well-met. From the parlours came the convivial soundsof drinking choruses, in the street outside, those whohad worshipped most devoutly the goat-riding god, sworeeternal friendships and reeled around... it wasSaturday night, the races were over, there is nopoverty in Brisbane...

Suddenly Lane the observer of merriment is accosted by his ownmental associations (memories?), that are so often kill-joy forthe bemused outsider: “I stood in the Courier doorway and enjoyedthe panorama, though the old proverb that a woman’s heart breakswhenever a man rejoices would play the unwelcome guest”, and soto the observation, acerbic but not unfair, that the blue ribbonof the temperance pledge that once held sway, had disappeared infour short months. Suddenly the other side returns, and for afew short moments, Lane seems to give way to hedonism: “the trulywise live only for the present, and though headache comes in themorning, it is more than balanced by the pleasures of thenight... ( ) the senses are all-powerful”.

And so, waiting for a case to study, a fugitive or reveller tofollow, he takes up a favoured role - the musing individualist:

And so I mused in the hopelessness that we all know butfew own, so I groped in the darkness that our gorgeouscivilisation only makes more intense, apingunconsciously the children who shut their eyes in thenight-time, and picture that within their hearts theyknow is Fancy’s own.

Into the midst of these peregrinations strides a picture ofsorrow, whom the reporter follows first to a chemist’s, thenacross the river to a “snug home” where “I saw him kneel beside arocking chair in which a young woman lulled a baby, I knew afather knelt beside his dying child”. A scene of great pathosensues, Lane reflects upon his love for his own child, and hisfear for it, and then the sick child actually dies in thereporter’s presence, to the wails of a despairing family.

Cholera was a real threat in Queensland at the time, therehaving been outbreaks in the north, and quarantine practices werein full vigour, although its existence in Brisbane itself wasalmost negligible. Nonetheless the unease was there,understandably, and Lane straddles a difficult wire between thefears common to all sensitive parents, and the sensationalist andmorbid phobias of an age brought up on the literature of theinfant martyrs of disease:

I thought how it would be with me if the baby-face wasflushed with fever, and the baby eyes grew dim with thecoming terror; I shrank with horror from the merethought of the emptiness that the lapse of the littlelife would make in mine; I could not bear to be withoutthe roguish lisper, I could not live and see the littleshoes lie useless forever more.

Tragically, horrendously, Lane would live to have that veryexperience. The child born in the coming year would die ofconvulsions at the age of three, and the next-born die bizarrelyin Paraguay, struck by a cricket ball over the heart. If we addto this woe the son lost at Gallipoli, we are left bereft ofunderstanding at such tragedy, pressented, feared, spoken of, inwhat can only be, at least for the actual presence of thereporter at the scene, a mixture of fear, fact and fabulation.And add to this the morality tale, all in the secret service oftemperance, and the victory of the “dyspeptic” over the merry-maker:

“Ah!” I thought, as I kissed [my baby’s] ruby mouth,“Sympathy is the greatest of all, the Senses are onlythe froth that comes to life; these innocents are as weshould be.Fond imagination! Quickly the sleepy eyes opened wide,the pearly teeth glimmered, and a little voicemurmured, “Tiss baby once more, pappa; pappa’s brefsmell nicey.”14

Sketcher’s next contribution was to be a nativity tale

published in the Christmas edition of the Queenslander, the

Courier’s weekly magazine.15 Here the tone is so different as to

make us wonder if it is the work of the same writer: in fact, if

it is indeed Lane’s work, it represents a remarkable mastery of

style. The scene is set in ‘’Fayette’, a ‘Mississippi’ town, in

the offices of a vibrant afternoon newspaper, the Call.16 It is14 Brisbane Brisbane Courier, Tuesday 15th December, 1885. Like his three previous articles, this and subsequent “Saturday Nights” also appeared in the Daily Observer on the same day.15 “30: A Study of Mississippi Life”, ‘written expressly for the Christmas Queenslander’,Saturday the 19th of December, 1885.16 There is a La Fayette situated on the Norfolk and Western railway line in Indiana,more or less between Detroit and Chicago. Although not on the Mississippi, it isnonetheless a riverine town, and is our best candidate for this story. It is notimpossible, as we will learn later through intra-textual analysis, that the Lanesspent some time working for a paper other than the Detroit Free Press, outside Detroit, and

Christmas morning and reporters are turning up for work, when

they learn of the suicide the evening before of Alice Kennedy,

the daughter of a local Methodist notable.17 The most virulent

reporter among them, the ‘special’ Alec Shaw, immediately repairs

to the scene of the crime, and is allowed in under false

pretences. His suspicions are aroused, and, later, when he

intercepts a telegram arrived belatedly for the victim, he

understands the amplitude of the scoop he is about to file, a

scoop great enough to sign the death-knell of the Call’s arch-

rival, the Dart. The young lady had hanged herself on hearing

that the object of her affections had just married, and this man

was none other than the famous leader of the revivalist crusade

that had recently passed through the town. Shaw works feverishly

on his piece, when he is interrupted by the object of his

affections, Nellie Richards, whose caring causes him to suddenly

burst into tears:

…he yearned with an inexpressible yearning for love andtenderness and comfort, why he couldn’t tell. (….) …then he bowed his head in his hands and cried as onlystrong men cry, with the tearing stifled sobs that tearthe lungs.

The deliverance he feels (“it was as though a ray of sunshine had

penetrated into a coal-mine”) causes him to propose to Nellie at

once, the which she accepts on the condition that he be “good”.

When she is gone, Shaw tears up the piece that he was writing

which would have destroyed a family, and “said instead that Alicein a river city, before leaving for England. 17 As this family frequents the “West ‘Fayette” church, and West Lafayette exists todayover the Wabash River from La Fayette, Indiana, we stand confirmed in oursuppositions as to the locality of the piece.

Kennedy had ‘petered out’ on religion, and said it kindly (. … )

- he who was notorious for the bitterness of his writing.”

Later, the editor storms in, learning he has been scooped by the

Dart.

The story serves several functions in the development of the

“Sketcher” persona. For one, it establishes him as having

intimate experience of the world of the press in the United

States, with its characters, its places, its language. (The “30”

of the title is explained as being American press jargon for

‘last copy’, here used both directly and metaphorically.) In so

doing, it also invites the observant to associate the author with

“Lucinda Sharpe”, already established as a ‘Yankee girl’, going

even one step further by mentioning at one point the Detroit Free

Press, and Detroit concerns.18 The effect of these partial

disclosures is a teasing, like the codes of clandestine lovers,

designed of course to strengthen their own passion.

Another function, more obvious, is to establish the reporter as

a writer, and so great is the difference in style, as I have

already noted, that we can assume one of only two things: that it

was an expression of a considerable writing talent; or that

somebody else - and who else but his wife Annie? - had written

it. The customary expressions and allusions that we are

beginning to associate with Sketcher, Greek goddesses, snide or

18 See our discussion on Lucinda Sharpe in the opening pages of Chapter I.

laborious or glorifying commentary on women, are almost absent.19

Its construction - the story is a fable that runs in two

directions, the redemption of the hardened reporter, and the

folly of letting a good story go - is admirably woven into the

backdrop of the blasé and committed world of the press, and the

sub-theme, a covert condemnation of the seductive powers, if not

the abusive hypocrisy, of revivalism, is done

in sotto voce, something to be imagined, or fantasized. Finally, we

want to know how much of the story is the Lanes’ story: that they

loved each other passionately, devotedly, is beyond question, but

did their love, too, begin in this epiphany, where the hardened

reporter “was calmed and comforted; he felt strangely happy;

something that had slumbered for years in his nature awoke to

life…”20

The third of the Brisbane Saturday Nights series appeared onthe 22nd of December 1885 in the customary Tuesday edition of theCourier21, on the subject of alcohol, in what was beginning to takethe appearance of a crusade, led, not from the front like theBooth campaign, but more cautiously from the flanks of an19 Perhaps the only ‘recognisable’ sentence, to this degree, comes towards the end,when Alec is sobbing: “Nellie hesitated. Women always look before they leap,novelists to the contrary…”20 It is interesting, at the level of the text, that the reporter and the suicideshould be paired by name (Alice and Alec), whilst “Nellie dear”, Alec’s saviour, wasthe name of: Annie Lane’s mother; her younger sister, Eleanor MacGuire, virtuallyadopted by the Lanes; the Lanes’ first child, apparently born in America; Charley’sAustralian cousin (and source of Lucinda’s jealousy) in As Others See Us; and the futureheroine of Lane’s novel The Workingman’s Paradise. We also notice the co-consonance ofLu(ke Shar)p and A(lec Shaw), Was this story, then, a fictionalised account of apassage of Will and Annie’s own love affair (or of the real Luke Sharp, Robert Barr)?Finally, the description of the sobbing of a man unused to tears, seems to us to be asrealistic, as personal, as such literature allows. 21 Subtitled “Run In” for the Observer.

apparent tolerance. To the backdrop of a general Queen Street“contentment”, Lane first categorises womankind, before pickingup on a “not too drunk, just drunk enough” baker:

the night is pleasant - as pleasant for the devotees ofDiana, the patroness of “women’s rights”, as for thosewho worship Venus, the all-conquering; and pleasant,too, for the good housewives who have long forswornsuch levities, and have dedicated their household firesto the good goddess Fornax.

After entertaining barmaids, shouldering other men in the crowd,and generally drinking too much, the baker finally ends upswearing at a pair of Irish policemen, who drag him off to thelock-up, where the roving reporter first begins to meet hisdestiny, the social conscience, doubtless fired by the report,twelve days previously, of the death of a drunkard in these self-same cells22: “it seemed to me a disgraceful thing that such alock-up should exist in Brisbane, in this, the nineteenthcentury”.

It was clean - the bare walls and stone floor and highceilings - it was whitewashed, the whole place smelt ofdisinfectants, but it fairly stank with the reek ofthat crowded dungeon, and the vermin from the filthylarrikins with whom he was herded, and from theblankets which swarmed with repulsive life, were worseto the poor baker than simple filth could ever havebeen.

No Black Hole of Calcutta this, nor Bedlam; no classconsciousness here either, in the exoneration of the police andthe condemnation of the “larrikins”; nor much sympathy for thewomen detained, “two wretched...Albert Street women whom one22 Hugh Connor had been arrested “helplessly drunk” on Tuesday the 8th December, andsentenced to a fine of 10 shillings or twelve hours in the police cells; by fiveo’clock in the afternoon he had been seized by a fit. Removed from the cell, he diedshortly after; the post-mortem concluded that he died “from congestion of the braininduced by [chronic alcoholism] aggravated by confinement in a close cell”. Thedoctor further considered that “it would be unsafe to put more than four men in thatcell for a period of twelve hours, especially drunkards, as they would be more liableto be affected by the heat and want of fresh air”. (Brisbane Courier, December 10th 1885.)

would not touch with a stick”; however, here a cry of freedom,here a cry of shame; here, in its offended sensibilities, itssomewhat patronising humanity, and its romantic sigh of disgrace,the later Lane of causes and revolts is visible as in achrysalis:

drunkard as he was, my heart went out to him for thegreat bond that is humanity. I knew that a man’s heartbeat still under his sottishness. I honoured himbecause he did not, like the others, sleep like a dogunder this injustice. I felt as we feel when the childstrikes back... (….) …as I strolled home under themoonlight and drank in the breezes that tasted, oh! sofresh and pure after that crowded ill-arranged watch-house... I felt that the treatment of “arrests”, drunkand disorderly though they be, is a disgrace to theGovernment of this colony, and a blot upon the fairfame of the people of Brisbane.23

An unsigned article in the Courier on Christmas Eve24 bears

Laneian touches - the lyrical references to a variety of

classical images, in particular, including “the good goddess

Fornax” again - but the supportive attitude throughout to

wholesale drinking suggests rather the hand of Lane’s editor,

Carl Feilberg.

23 Brisbane Courier /Daily Observer (“Brisbane Saturday Nights - III”; subtitled “Run In” inthe Observer), Tuesday 22nd December, 1885. Although the man who died two weeks beforemay well have been classed as a larrikin, being about thirty years old and analcoholic, it is clear in this piece that Lane places in apposition that sub-class andthe baker, member of a trade currently in dispute, and soon to be the object ofLucinda Sharpe’s sympathies. Not only were the bakers servants of “the good goddessFornax”, but their trade lent to the proposition of a return to a more fundamentalsociety, based on domestic values, and capable - as indeed the bakers did duringtheir strike of the breaking year - of contributing to the foundation of a new kind ofco-operative society.24 “Christmas Eve in Brisbane”, Brisbane Courier, Friday 25th December 1885.

On the first day of the new year, Lane’s contribution was yet

another jibe at the “measureless strength of fanaticism”, the

description of a Salvation Army wedding in the summer heat,

replete with full-dress uniforms, waving handkerchiefs, song and

jogging “in the popular Salvation fashion, knees bent, feet

shuffling, hands waving wildly overhead.”25 Still intent on

mixing reporting with irony, he makes great mileage out of the

confusion of procedures, the orchestrated jollity, the strange

enthusiams evoked by militant religion, concluding that it was

more “a mild revival of Iris, a christianisation of the

Bacchannal days of Rome.” At the same time he remarks upon “all

kinds and conditions of men and women, from the veiled society

miss, resplendent in dainty muslins and glittering jewellery, to

the Albert-street larrikin, dirty and lawless, who had come to

see the fun and make a row.” Lane patently loves the spectacle

of self-importance getting carried away by enthusiasm (the

adjutant in charge holds up his baby boy to the crowd crying “the

future Governor of Queensland!”), and has both a sympathy for,

and a contempt of, organised religion; and neither does he fail

to characterize the sexes in a way he holds dear: “the bridegroom

stumbled clumsily through the reponses and repetitions; the bride

answered softly, being very self-possessed, as women always are”,

a parallel to another couple who had committed “a wretchedly sung

duet… concluded by the husband boasting that he had been picked

25 Brisbane Courier (“A ‘Hallelujah’ Wedding”), Friday 1st January, 1886.

up out of the gutter - which fact his good-looking marble-necked

wife seemed to find much pleasure in.” This will be Sketcher’s

last lampoon of religious crusades for a while - the movement has

had its moment and has served to nurse him through his first six

months of being - and he is about to step out onto a grander

stage.

The recent death in custody, blamed on the foul air in the

Brisbane lock-up, caused Lane to foray further into the world of

investigative journalism: dressed as a dead-beat and liberally

perfumed with whiskey, he got himself arrested and put in a cell

for the night. The result was a sensation that sealed Sketcher’s

notoriety, a long description of life in the lock-up that reached

Sydney - it was published there in the Daily Telegraph on the 9th of

January - and begat a whole movement for prison reform.26

Significantly, the article begins in a similar vein to the

opening “Brisbane Saturday Night” piece, a challenge and a

connivance between a reporter and his editor, and ‘Henry Harris’

soon has his ear nastily tweaked by an otherwise humane

policeman, and finds himself with nine other ‘drunks’ in a

squalid and foul cell, whose drinking water is indistinguishable

for some from the water closet. Most of the article is taken up

by the imitation of the Irish brogues, by a more-or-less comic

26 A commission would be appointed to inquire into the condition of gaols and otherpenal establishments, handing down its report on the 1st of September 1887.

tale of pugnacious ‘Paddies’, interspersed with vomative accounts

of the floor, the air, and the drinking of ‘water’. In the end,

all is revealed before a confused magistrate, who spends more

time protecting his officers from the charge of false arrest,

than dealing with the

fact that his lock-up and his system are about to be exposed.

Rather than hypocrisy, or vile abuse, it is the aesthetics that

Lane seems to aim at, quite content to exonerate all individuals,

but not quite so content as to the general ugliness of it all:

Drunks though they were, some were respectable men, andwho knows the bitter thoughts that came in thatinfernal pit of stench, filth and semi-suffocation?(….) …the bottom of the walls was crusted in theremains of vomit and tobacco-juice, and allabominations; it was clear that a sweeping is all thecleaning that a drunks’ cell usually gets. It wasinfernal - from the herded bodies of the sleeping sotsa noxious exhalation rose, poisoning the air theirstinking breath, laden with the gases that form in adrunkard’s stomach, could be smelt whichever way oneturned; from the choked closet in the corner, inrepeated use, remember, came a stench so unutterablyvile that I wondered how these sleeping sots managed tolive, even when a reporter, strong, temperate, andhealthy, inured, as reporters are, to unpleasantsituations and unhealthy atmospheres, felt as thoughone giant hand gripped his heart while another pressedheavily on the back of his head.

In this discourse we hear a number of themes: a) the appeal to

the offended sensibility; b) a - perhaps deliberate - confusion

of prison conditions and the evils of drink; c) a relish for what

some observers of Victorian morality call “the worm in the bud”27

- dirt; and d) the construction and embodiment of the mythology

of the reporter. No doubt William Lane, alias Sketcher, alias

Henry Harris, has excited himself with his own story-telling of

two weeks past, and ‘special’ Alec Shaw lives on, larger than

fiction, larger than life. No doubt the Courier, mocking its

great rival the Telegraph28 for taking so long to acknowledge the

newsworthiness of the story over a week later, is also between

the Call and the Dart, between reality and fiction. And no doubt,

also, that the procedure had been suggested by the scandal

running high in December last, of Stead, the editor of the Pall

Mall Gazette, who had paid a woman to procure a girl for

prostitution, to show how easily it could be done.29

The article was not only a great success, but the Courier knew

full well it would be before going to press, advertising on its

editorial page “NEW YEAR’S NIGHT IN THE CELLS. A REPORTER AMONG

THE DRUNKS. The Description of a night passed by a Reporter in

the Brisbane Lockup, appearing in another column of today’s

27 Ronald Pearsall: The Worm in the Bud, The World of Victorian Sexuality, Pimlico, London, 1993 (1st

publ. 1969).28 In its edition of the 14th of January. This is the Brisbane Telegraph, not its Sydneynamesake which published the article in a contracted form on the 9th of January.29 Stead was jailed for three months on the 10st of December (the news was published bythe Brisbane Courier on the 22nd). Meetings were held the world over in support of his“Social Purity” cause. On the 15th of December 1885, for example, a meeting in theBrisbane Town Hall was told by a Queensland parliamentarian that “the Pall Mall Gazette, ashort while ago, [had] startled the whole world, by exposing the existence, in theheart, not only of England, but of civilisation, of a traffic compared with which theslave market at Constantinople might have been described as innocence itself.”(Brisbane Courier, December 16th 1885.) Pearsall (op. cit.) devotes a chapter to the Steadcase.

Courier, will also be published in the Observer THIS AFTERNOON.

Agents requiring Additional Copies will please give timely

notice.” On the 8th of January (“The Police Cells Again”) the

Courier reported a minor revolt in the lock-up, the drunks having

taken to hammering on their cell because their earth latrine was

running over. At the same time an ill-attended wound had bled

all over a blanket that ‘Harris’ had already condemned as lice-

ridden. By the 9th another cause, and an altogether worthy one,

had been found, crowned as it were by its own column: “The Police

Cells”; and on the 28th “Cell Rat” writes to the editor saying

nothing has changed, and “trusting your reporter will not forget

an occasional note on these police court ‘dens’”.

It should not be forgotten, however, that the greater part of

Sketcher’s article was taken up in the reporter’s own excited

preparations, and in the characterisation of his co-inmates, none

of whom would have been able to correct or validate Lane’s

rendering of their behaviour, discussions and dialects. Knowing

him to have had himself an Irish father given to excessive

drinking, we may surmise on the imaginative origins of such

monologues as these:

“Whist man,” he muttered, “Listhen to me voice. It’ssound’s hollow, oi’m doying, that shows oi’m doying.If Oi wuzn’t doying me voice wouldn’t sound hollow.Oi’ll report this to the papers, oi’ll write to theChronicle” - whatever the Chronicle was - “that they puttoo many min in wan cell. There’s wan, two, three,four, fifteen, fifty-three. Oi can’t count, but ther’stoo many anyway, an’ oi’ll write to the paypers that

there’s too many in wan cell. They wouldn’t do this inOirland, an’ I’ll go straight back home whin I get out,me that was niver locked up before except to see it.”30

Nonetheless, Lane’s courage and audacity cannot be denied, and

his description of the insufficiencies of the cells will be

repeated in the report of the Board of Inquiry into Queensland’s

prisons as “shamefully inadequate”. “Indeed,” an Observer

editorial will later profess, “it seems rather extraordinary that

the Brisbane lock-up has not before now been the scene of a

catastrophe almost as great as that of the Black Hole of

Calcutta.”31

Lane’s fourth “Brisbane Saturday Night”32 outing was a sort ofantidote to the very public, ostentatious Salvation Army weddingof just a few days before. He supposedly followed a clergyman toa poor, immigrant, outer suburb - “his journey to Red Hill was alittle ovation” - where he performed a simple marriage ceremony -“Two lives were joined that night for weal or for woe; one morehome was planted in the garden that is Queensland; one more manwas bound to society by the great bond that is marriage” - endsup, despite its romantic visions of the simple poor -“cheaplyclad indeed, but on her cheeks was the hue of health thatmillions cannot purchase” - as another platform for the writer’sviews on women:

Women make or mar us; there is no need of the equalityof the sexes, for a true woman is higher and noblerthan ever man can hope to be. Such a woman can sway thevery soul of him who loves her, can lead him up toheaven as in her depravity she can drag him down tohell.

30 Twice in the course of the article Lane pronounced himself a total abstinent, never having drunk a drop of alcohol in his life.31 Daily Observer, September 5th 1887.32 Brisbane Courier /Daily Observer, (“Brisbane Saturday Nights - IV”; subtitled “A QuietWedding” in the Observer), Tuesday 5th January 1886.

This may have been just a poor immigrant girl, but “there shonein her eyes the priceless gem of a true woman’s love”, and “therewas no truer woman in Brisbane than this lowly bride”, eventhough she cried “for women will weep at improper times,irrespective of social rank”, for, after all, “womanhood is not apart of wealth and rank, is not put off like a garment”. Lane’sgynocentricity is clearly a double-edged sword, bearing woman tothe heights as to the depths, not shrinking from undressing her,nor worshipping, nor patronizing, and at all times making itclear that she is responsible, which, of course, can be only abreath away from guilty. At the same time we cannot help thinkingthat in the juxtaposition of the two ceremonies reported justfour days apart there is something of a politico-cultural intent,in which the Salvation Army, for all its marginalisation from theestablished church, represents for him the hypocriticalostentation of the old society, whilst this simpler, moreauthentic ritual, is of the order of the new, an almostrousseaistic vision.33

The next week’s offering, subtitled “The Lonely New Chum” in

the Observer34, is a departure in style and content that we can

consider important in understanding Lane, for, using the pretext

of observation, he engages in a fantasy of the mood of a new

immigrant that is little short of a projection of his own

33A small article entitled “That Quiet Wedding” appeared in the Observer on January 9th

in which “the coatless man” wished to “correct what he considers “Sketcher’s”mistakes”, saying: “ that he bride’s dress was not brown silk; that a gold brooch wasnot her only jewellery; that the wife was not the only one who could write, as thecoatless man signed his name, and the bride could have signed hers. He also assertsthat the minister was not the only one who congratulated and kissed the bride, andhints that the man in the reporter’s shoes was not backward in availing himself ofthat privilege. We are afraid those reporter’s shoes are not properly fulfillingtheir functions, and must warn “Sketcher” to overhaul them before he again goes forthon his mysterious missions.”34 Brisbane Courier /Observer, Tuesday 12th January 1886.

recently-revived feelings of leaving his homeland to make a new

life alone and far away. Unwittingly, by creating a character

who at first resists the temptations of a bar, and then succumbs,

a character who is compared all along with another, latent, loved

and cared-for version, he represents three personae within his

own “inner” immigrant: the lost and lonely, the one who was

welcomed and taken in, and the one who adapted himself to his

situation in such a way as to lose his true self. The first

resists the temptations of drink because “a mother’s prayer rang

in his ear...a mother’s prayer to that God who sees in Queensland

as in England, that he would keep and guard her darling boy from

harm”, a connection symbolised by “a locket that hung on his

watch-chain, the token of a bond that knit two hearts in the

strength of passionate love”.

Suddenly, in this story, we are privy to a sketch of the inner,a confession, neither religious nor rousseauesque, in which thewriter seems to be overwhelmed by his projective fantasy, andthen reclaims it, for, if the recent arrival himself, in what isclearly more a tale than a reportage, renounces the memory of hismother and his sweetheart - intertwined - and pursues anotherpath - so great is his loneliness - Lane without warning orcontext suddenly ends with a comparison of the way newcomers arereceived in America, an association of ideas that all the moreconvincingly places this article as a self-description, past,present, and future-to-be-avoided:

America has her vices, God knows, her sins of omissionand commission to answer for, but at least none can saythat she was ever inhospitable, that she shut her heartto the stranger who came to sojourn within her gates.Cousin Jonathon is shrewd at a bargain, will cheat his

best friend if he gets a chance, but at least his houseand hearth are free to all his acquaintances, and theman who is quicker at making acquaintances has to besmart - very smart.

Young Will left England at fourteen, was befriended in Canada,to the point of having his club foot operated on for free; we canonly speculate on his reasons for leaving but we do know that hewas strongly attached to his mother, and made vows to her ondeparting; when he arrived in Australia at age 24, he was happilymarried. His new chum “was neat and tidy, though evidentlywoman’s loving hands did not wash his buttons, or mend hiscollars”, a situation Lane seems to have avoided, both as ateenager, and as a married man, at both emigrations. Perhaps thechild that left his country devoted to his mother was youngenough to inspire warmth and charity, perhaps Lane was ever ableto replace that loving mother with others, and with a wife, andthat his awareness of how close he came to disaster made himeternally grateful to “woman”, to “mother”, a debt he would repayover and over with eulogies and his own passionate brand offeminism? Perhaps, in fact, his obsession with “Her” was as muchan expression of a certain kind of migrant experience, atransference of the sadness and nostalgia of what was leftbehind, and the immense good fortune and “smartness” of beingable to replace it?

In this fifth “Brisbane Saturday Night”, Sketcher forgets for amoment to be a reporter, and returns to being Will; trying toretrieve the observer’s privileges, too late he says: “it is nota reporter’s place to be a moralist”... “beneath the surface,behind the scenes, where a reporter dives and gropes, one learnstoo well that in some way or other all are weak and mortal”.Sketcher is trying to ward off what Will well knows, that he isnot talking about another mortal at all, he is seeing himself,and reconfirming a vow made long ago to his mother and perhapsrepeated to his wife: no alcohol.

Sketcher would like to define himself as a reporter, animpartial, even impassive observer, wary at least of moralising;this self-description, however, is far distant from the truth: heis at times in his “Brisbane Saturday Night” series, a committed,unrepentant moraliser, who uses the observed as a trampoline forhis leaps of lesson-giving.

Two days after “The Lonely New Chum”, Sketcher signed anarticle on the Sutton Foundry at Kangaroo Point, just across theriver from the Brisbane township.35 “A Queensland Foundry” ismore-or-less a hack job describing the size, output andtechniques of the colony’s largest iron works, imbued with aconventional local pride couched in terms identifiable nowadayswith state propaganda. The difference lies firstly in Lane’shigh-blown introduction, attempting to place iron at the centreof civilisation, then in the way he lionises the workersthemselves as icons of humanity:

…the men who have subdued [the metal] and conquered itare the men who have made us what we are. They aregood men, too, and honest men, are the iron-workers;they have no fancy prices as have the glaziers after ahailstorm, nor do they flourish on the animal passionsas do vendors of ice-cream; they are men with brawnyarms and hairy bodies, and with keen sharp eyes, andany one of whom could thrash a dozen weakling counter-jumpers as easily as he hammers his daily bread fromthe clutches of the Iron King.

The description becomes more homo-erotic as the voyage into theheart of the foundry pursues its course, and we become aware thatwe are at the beginning of what we will know to be a long periodof idolatry of the strong male body by the frail young

35 Brisbane Courier, Thursday14th January 1886. The foundry had been the scene of a minoraccident a few weeks after Lane’s arrival in Brisbane, when a crane partly derailed(ibid, 21st July 1885).

journalist, a flattery of the working- class that will seducemany into believing the images of themselves created, perhaps, bysomething like that “shrinking nervousness of the literary man”that was jarred by the feats of these “twenty-six stalwart smithsstripped to the undershirt, black with dust and streaky withsweat, [looming] up in the glow that struggles with thedaylight”.

The next moral tale, “The Fallen One” for the “BrisbaneSaturday Nights”,36 maintains an actual backdrop to contain whatcan only be, given the intimacies “observed”, a confabulation: heespies a woman he recognises as a prostitute, done down to appearthe waitress she is by day, hurrying tearfully towards the docks,there to try and catch a glimpse of her parents and sisterwaiting in a quarantined migrant ship. A stern matron sends heron her way, but relents before her pleas “as any true womanwould, to the cry of a desolate heart”; a melodramatic sceneensues in which the fallen one embraces in her arms her spotlesspast, her younger sister unaware of the shame the matron sees,and that the elder feels, her heart cut by the younger’s innocentquestioning. The next day she returns to see her mother:

She was only an English peasant woman; she had neverstudied metaphysics; she could hardly write her name;but the instinct that a woman shares with all creation,the overpowering love of the mother for the child shebore, was to her an inspiration, and, like a gleam oflightning revealed the truth. She knew it all ere aword was spoken; knew that the bloom had gone from thepeach, that rude circumstance had brushed the dust fromthe butterfly’s wing. She tasted in that moment thebitterness of death; in her heart’s agony she wishedthat she had buried the loved one that stood downcastbefore her.

36 Brisbane Courier /Observer, Wed.nesday 20th January 1886.

This, of course continues the previous tale, but instead of themother finding out her young man had become a hardened, drinkingmember of the Brisbane bustle, she finds her daughter aprostitute, the lowest rank of shame. The story is not aboutdamnation, however, but redemption, and the mother is as a Jesus,recognising, accepting, saving:

They know not women who tell us that the mother canturn from her child; they wrong the grandeur ofmaternity who say that ever a true mother cursed anerring daughter. The love of man for woman bridgesoceans and laughs at death, but the love of a motherelevates man to the throne of God the Supreme. (….)So she clasped the outcast to her in the glare of thegaslight, knowing all the sin and the shame of it,making no excuse for it, looking over it and beyond, asonly a mother can. (....) …a mother’s arm claspedher, and a mother’s hand led her up from the depths.

There follows a short description of the men’s quarters, of arecalcitrant Irishman who demanded to be allowed to sleep withhis wife, but which “the Law with a big L” refused, and in whichthe germination of a protest breaks through the surface gently(“if the attendants were not as willing and intelligent as theyare, the depot would be unbearable. That it is not is by no meansdue to the Government”); but the night belongs to the fallenangel arisen from sin and shame through her mother’s devotion, analtogether Christian tale, were it not for the pagan references,the Moon of Diana appearing at the moment of triumph, as theclouds veil the wayward Venus, along with the “hand of Jupiter”by whom the rains came.

In a land where lives were thrown upside down by opportunityand the vagaries of fortune, it is easy to imagine the power ofsuch a simple moral tale, whose readers can only hear that thetransformations they had gone through since their or theirfamilies’ arrivals, although sometimes a disappointment or an

offence to those left behind, were ultimately redeemable, even inthe extreme, by the mother, if not the mother country. And in ourattempts to understand who William Lane was, in his Sketcherpersona, we note that an English peasant mother is devoted to herchild, while an Irish husband bemoans his empty bed, and wonderat what story lies therein.

If Sketcher’s recent article on the Brisbane foundry is ourfirst glimmer of Lane’s later infatuation with the Australianmale physique, then this next, based on the nine-hour trainjourney to the Darling Downs that he appears to have justreturned from, is our first inkling of the idealised self-sufficient country life that was to become the model of hisutopian plans.37 His over-ripe descriptions of the land, itsproduce and the table of this, doubtless, one of its richestfarmers, is saturated with appeals to the senses and to sense:

“That’s home industry for you,” announced Mr. Kates;“we can live here without asking anything from anybody,and this is how Queensland should be.” Of course itis, thought the “Sketcher”, as he finished his thirdhelping of lamb and moralized about his ability to getoutside both pie and custard.

“Mr. Kates” - no doubt the MLA who, as a Christmas gesture, had

given his Parliamentary fees to charity38 - is an extraordinarily

wealthy man, and Lane points out clearly enough that few farmers

are in his situation. Nonetheless, the description is one of a

37 “Mr. Kates at Home”, Brisbane Courier, Thursday 21st January 1886.38 See Brisbane Courier editorial, December 23rd 1885. Lane had perhaps met him inParliament, and accepted an invitation to stay at his property during the summerrecess. Kates had formerly brought forward a motion in the Legislative Assemblyasking the Government to repurchase two large Darling Downs estates and sub-divide andsell them to small selectors, an attitude to land distribution that could have beenseen by Lane as progressive, but which was viewed with caution by the Courier, whoseeditorial warned that “this proposition is really one to take some £300,000 of thepublic money and divide it between the representatives of the dummies who acquiredthese estates and a few favoured Darling Downs farmers”. (See Brisbane Courier, August10th 1885.)

real Utopia, longed-for and believed in, “planned for” even,

although on the return to the “thronging city” he “planned it all

back again… for an Ethiopian might as well change his skin as a

townsman so live happily without the bustle of the crowd.” Lane

is not yet ready; but his dreamy remembrance of the plains of

England and America and the feelings of plenitude and snugness

that had been brought forward on this trip westward will be re-

echoed when the drive for a new society begins, just a few years

hence.

His next article is the seventh of the “Brisbane Saturday

Nights” series, published in the Observer as “Johnny’s Happy

Home”.39 The subterfuge of the reporter lounging in the doorway

of the Courier watching the faces in the crowd, then deciding to

follow one of them, has here worn decidedly thin, for this

reporter can not only see into the pockets of the young man he

“follows”, but also read the letter therein. What follows is an

imaginary story conjured in the mind of the reporter, a fantasy

loosely cast on the unsuspecting mien of an eighteen-year-old on

his way home after work, across the river to Kangaroo Point and

an idyll of greenery “like a gem from an English landscape amid

the glow of southern scenery… The stars spangled overhead” (again

Australia makes him associate, in order, on England and America).

The young man takes his turn at the oar, provoking Sketcher’s

39 Brisbane Courier /Observer, Wed.nesday 27th January 1886.

first foray into racial theory, since his muscles show “that

those who fancy that the Aryan stock degenerates in the South are

to be numbered among the millions who make a great mistake”.

The young man returns to a home filled with happy hearty

siblings, a “mamma” to whom all matters are referred, and “papa,

who was Conservative, arguing about Home Rule for Ireland with

the second boy, who was fiery with the radicalism of 15.”

Johnnie has brought home lollies for all, including his sweet-

heart, who stays late joining in the household games and supper,

until he walks her home with a timid hand around her waist, at

which point Sketcher tries to rally to his reporter’s trade -

“and there I left them”, having witnessed hour upon hour of

intimate family life from the viewpoint of his own imagination

which, it would be seem, has left a little room for memory. This

idyllic dreaming has by now quite overtaken the reporting, and we

are fast moving out of reality and into ideology, based in race,

muscle, love and family life. The cottage is “snug”, Mamma is “a

plump and comely matron on whom the sorrows of maternity had

fallen lightly”, and Johnnie’s lover is a “shrine where he had

already lain his heart”. This is a panegyric to love, by a man

who has found it himself:

I had seen the divine passion before; I had seen thecorpse of a man who would not survive his sweetheart; Iknew a woman who gave up home and husband and childrenfor her own fair fame and love; but never had Irealised before the full force of affection.

Annie left behind everyone but her sister to elope with Will,

left America to follow him to England, then Australia, then

Paraguay, and back to Australia and New Zealand. Their passion

for each other was visible to all who knew them, and survived

until, and even beyond, their deaths. Johnnie and Katie loved

each other like Will and Annie, in the reconstructed context of

an imagined Brisbane family idyll, far from their actual

backgrounds of struggle, violence and cruel authority. “There is

no influence under heaven/” he quotes, “So to bring out the good

that is in man/ As doth the maiden passion for a maid.” In his

New World, pure love reigns supreme.

As for Sketcher’s regular column, its hack nature has become

such by the next article, that there is some considerable doubt

as to whether Lane actually wrote it, all the more so for a

reference to “the ‘Sketcher’ man” who took down all the details

from the interested party and composed the piece. A long and

technical description of the fabrication of ice,40 it has the

Lane touch only in the high-blown phrases of the first

paragraphs, the by-now typical Laneian references to

civilisations past and the imaginary debates of philosophers,

those “who tell us that this civilisation lives from hand to

mouth - that if anarchy triumphed but for a generation, the

knowledge that now makes men kin to gods would be lost for

40 “How Ice is Made”, Brisbane Courier, Monday 1st February 1886.

evermore.” This of course is a ploy to put Lane’s own inner

debate on the question of progress - one in which the enthusiast

struggles with the cynic, as we have seen in prior articles on

revivalism; what’s more, he flatters his readership at the same

time as almost mocking them, as the expansive language meets the

everyday: “for though this civilisation neglects posterity most

shamefully, it takes good care of itself. (….) Captain Ricardo of

the Queensland Ice and Freezing Company is one of the initiated…”

Apparently the piece he had written on the foundry several

weeks before had sown the seeds of envy, and Lane’s editor has

seen fit to exploit the amour-propre of another captain of

industry by reproducing all the procedures of ice manufacture,

and all of the dimensions of the company’s premises and

machinery. Lane, for his part, hasn’t seen fit to contribute

anything but the overture, leaving the hack work for his “man”.

Two weeks later, Green’s Confectionery gets a similar treatment:

an introduction half-vaunting, half-mocking, the progress to

civilisation of the day, followed by a workmanlike account of a

factory, its procedures, its equipment, staff and output.41

Lane’s embellishments make this series of rounds of the local

manufacturers a little more interesting than a list of fact and

figures, and disguise only slightly the publicist collaboration

between the companies and the newspaper. In this particular

41 “Green and Co.’s Confectionary Works”, Brisbane Courier, Monday 15th February 1886.

outing we learn that nothing will ever better the taffy made by

“the Sketcher” as a young man out of stolen produce, and that:

the roast beef of England made of our fathers aconquering race; the bon-bon of Paris encouraged thatlove for the beautiful that now dictates the fashionsof the civilised world; Australia judiciously mixes hereatings as she does her drinks, and is evolving therebyinto a nation that will lay over England for pluck,France for taste, and the whole world for general get-upiveness. Australians will say so, anyway.

Interestingly, each new piece of work currently being published

seems to bring with it the smatterings of themes which will

dominate Lane’s writings for many years to come, in this case an

Australian patriotism, albeit - in the Australian way - mantled

in self-irony.

In between these two articles come two in the “Brisbane

Saturday Nights” series, the first of which is the obverse to the

happy home previously encountered, the violent and confused

household of a larrikin in the making.42 Lane starts out with an

interesting description of a larrikin pimp with bell-bottomed

pants, high-heeled boots, high-collared shirts and gaudy rings,

then follows home the twelve-year-old admirer of this “voluntary

outcast”, before witnessing household scenes of cuffs, slaps,

bashings, and a thrashing administered to the point where “I

wondered how a boy could take so much and live.” Once more the

mother reigns, but here by violence, favouritism, and hounding

her husband, who, instead of working by day as he claims,42 “Bill’s Unhappy Home”, Brisbane Courier, Tuesday 2nd February, Observer, Wed.nesday 3rd February 1886.

actually goes boating. The omniscient eye of the Sketcher

transcends time and place and logic, for we are asked to believe

that he followed the boy into the house, where he - supposedly -

sat unnoticed at table with its uproarious inhabitants, the moral

tale trying to wrench its way into reality by sheer dint of

imaginative force. The physical description of the senior

larrikin aside - and he is much closer to the gilded youth than

to the “Henry Harris” hobo version in early January - all of the

scenes are cameos of the Victorian social conscience: the brutal

language of the pimp exacting his dues “earned by shame”; the

younger boy looking longingly into the backyard of a happy home;

right down to the mother crying at night:

he had gone to his home longing for such joy andcomfort: he had found nothing but hard words andinjustice; he could not understand that his motherknelt by his bed when the house was still, and thehours of darkness were over all, sobbing as though herheart would break for the boy who was growing alarrikin, but whom she loved in spite of all.

In Lane’s version of the world, there was good and evil, and

above them both was mother-love. Fathers could not help their

lazy ways, their impulsive and injudicious authority, for they

had none over themselves; mothers were the true heart of all

society, and, even when all was lost, and the misery of the child

compounded by the unfortunate life of the larrikin, he would live

in mortification if only he knew of the suffering of the woman

that bore him. Motherhood, here a “theory” in germination, will

transcend all in the Lane world-view, and will be the thread of

social analysis that can knit racism to utopian communism. The

happy home that Johnny enjoyed is the manichean counterpoint to

the one suffered by, and no doubt productive of, “this

representative of the scum that Caucasian civilisation distils

under the blue Australian sky”, the fault, in the end, of a lazy

and violent father who exerts his authority only out of annoyance

and jealousy of that his wife enjoys. All that is missing to

make it an allegory of Lane’s own childhood household, perhaps,

is alcohol, and its absence we constantly expect to be corrected.

“Behind the Scenes”43 is something of a compromise. The

“Brisbane Saturday Nights” series has become unbelievable

reporting, Sketcher having introduced himself into implausible

situations, whilst the whole idea had been to get a real story

out of the everyday. Furthermore, Sketcher’s great reputation

had been built on his acerbic but precise descriptions of

temperance meetings, and his very real introduction into the

confines of the Brisbane lockup. But he seems to have lost his

inspiration, or his courage. Standing in the wings of a theatre

and watching its comings and goings, then, allows him to re-

establish the authenticity of his series, even though him

supposedly following a young actress to the stage only thinly

43 Brisbane Courier /Observer, Wednesday 10th February 1886. The title is somewhat of anenigma, for, although it is obviously justified by the context, it had already beenerroneously attributed to a previous Sketcher article just a month before by no less aperson than the Inspector of Police, during a hearing into the allegations about theconditions of the Brisbane lock-up. Perhaps Lane and his editor thought it wasworthwhile cashing in on Henry Harris’ notoriety, or maybe the very subject of thepiece was suggested by the Inspector’s mistake, as a joke on the police even. (See“The Police Cells, Inspector Lewis in Explanation”, Brisbane Courier, January 9th 1886.)

disguises the more obvious fact that his presence was organised

beforehand, and the resulting lack of verve puts the piece closer

to the propaganda articles for foundry, ice-factory and

confectionery-works, than any real insider view, let alone

exposé, of the theatre. Mechanical prose is the mean, with the

occasional, by now customary, aside on the nature of woman, as if

Lane is among the few who understand her:

There is a woman’s heart in the play-actress, thoughsome deny it who know no good but in their own crampedugly natures, and so the gay Clarissa sobbed for veryweariness… (….) And many a time actresses must bethusly; must, weary and tired, be forced to be glad andgay; men call them light of love - men who do not knowthem - but there is many a noble woman earning anhonest living, working early and late in spite ofwomanly weakness… leading lives that the slanderersmight try to imitate in vain.

The actress, then, is the opposite pole to the woman of shame,

all the more worthy for the apparent resemblances between them,

for behind her artifice lies a heart that can sob, and a will to

work that surpasses her capacities. Lane’s defence of women

gained him no doubt many admirers and enhanced his following, but

it comes at the price of a certain idolatry on the one hand, and

the bigotry of received notions - her “weakness” in particular -

on the other.

On the 25th of February, Sketcher published his last “Saturday

Night” for the major dailies, over a year before leaving the

paper to found his own, and recall the column to its uses. For

the time being however, it has run out of steam, and the editor’s

initial claim that there were as many stories in the faces in the

crowd in Brisbane as in London, will not have proved true in

Lane’s hands. The stories have become fables; worse, the last

was almost indistinguishable from any hack piece on a local

establishment. This end-piece, subtitled “Around the Fountain”

in the Observer,44 is an attempt to move away from the pretence of

following individuals into their private lives, and towards a

cameo of Brisbane society in a given time and at a given place.

Thus the fountain at the end of Queen Street, with its focus

around a Salvation Army speaker, and the half-interested denizens

who stop to listen. Once again we get a description of the

drunk, of the larrikin, and of good little children, to which are

added a little group of sullen Muslim “Hindoos” (sic), and

workers of different political stripes, all more engaged in the

niceties of English politics than that of Queensland or

Australia. The speaker is predictably ridiculous, the workers

conventionally discursive, and the drunk barely comic. The

article begins as follows:

…the hastily-built fountain at the foot of Queen-streetis of comparatively little use to the thirsty, for thegood people of Brisbane are not yet so poor that theyare compelled to drink the luke-warm muddy Enoggera,but it is a God-send to those who wait for the ‘bussesand for those who grow foot-weary with tramping thegreat thoroughfare on Saturday night.

44 Brisbane Courier /Observer, Thursday 25th February 1886.

It will not be a God-send for the journalist, however, as neither

the crowd nor his description of it will come close to validating

a column that is not only foot-weary, but has quite lost its way.

“Down to Dunwich and Back”45 is a short essay on a steam-boat

trip to the tiny settlement on North Stradbroke Island. The

occasion had been an annual charity concert,46 although it may

have been suggested to “Henry Harris” that this would be an

opportunity to check on the recent reforms carried out in its

favour, especially, perhaps, “the penalties… provided for an

officer who… ‘conceals, or attempts to conceal, or wilfully

neglects to show’ any part of the asylum to a visiting inspector,

justice or medical officer”.47 Sketcher prefers the opportunity

to congratulate the party for having no dignitaries amongst them,

to snicker at them for singing more than Evangelist songs, to

45 Brisbane Courier /Daily Observer, Tuesday 2nd March 1886; titled “Down to Dunwich: A Wet and Windy Trip” in the Observer.46 The concert was meant to have been given, as was the custom, on New Year’s Day, butthe steamer “Dorunda”, the object of a cholera outbreak, lay in quarantine betweenMoreton Bay and the island at the time. (Brisbane Courier, February 15th 1887. Theeditorial announced that “presents of books, periodicals, fruit, lollies or tobaccomay be sent”.)47 By his Charitable Institutions Management Act, gazetted in May 1885 and assented tothat September, Premier Griffith, who had already given evidence to a select committeeon the asylum in 1879, created a stricter regimen that both protected the inmates fromthe interference of their keepers, and prohibited them from luxuries such as alcoholand tobacco, as well as making more of them pay and/or work for their keep. Inaddition, as recently as January 1st 1886 he replaced the superintendant (with adoctor). Griffith’s biographer considers that “it was the asylums for theunfortunates that tested the limits of Griffith’s liberal humanitarianism and theextent of the colony’s commitment to those unable to survive in competitive society”,noting that the Premier had refused to support the setting-up of a workshop or schoolfor the blind sent to Dunwich. (Roger B. Joyce: Samuel Walker Griffith, U.Q.P., St. Lucia,1984, p. 115 and nn. 32-34, p. 379.)

make fun of the conventions dropping off as the picnic outing met

rough seas, and to cast a paternal eye on the devices of young

lovers. But the piece is also notable for its description of

the threadbare existence eked out by the few old people who are

described as inhabiting the desolate place, for the wry humour

that holds the work together, and for its picture of the

transformationary effect of music on an old woman:

There was one little old woman, almost harpy-like inher appearance, her head hidden in the recesses of agreat white hood, her face expressive of no humanfeeling, of nothing but an existence that had no kindlythought. She came in slowly and whispered to herneighbour that she wished they’d hurry up with thepresents; when the old tunes rose and fell in touchingcadence, she dropped her mask of brutality and was awoman again. In the dull eye glimmered the light thatis humanity, down the haggish cheeks rolled the tearsof awakened recollections, the hard old mouth workedand trembled, the poor withered hands clutched vainlyat a lump that would stay in her throat. She sat thereunheeding when they gave her the coveted package; shedrank in every swelling note like one who thirsted evento death; she sat there still when the Otter’s whistleblew loudly to call all on board…

Nothing, in fact, suggests the nature of Dunwich, an asylum for

those considered incurable to medicine, for paupers, the

mentally-retarded, and the aged bereft of family or care, an

“island institution out of sight and therefore out of mind”.48

No doubt the Courier readership would have been perfectly aware of

48 Ronald Lawson: Brisbane in the 1890s, A Study of Australian Urban Society, Brisbane, U.Q.P., 1973,p. 141. The population of the island increased dramatically during the depression ofthe 1890s.

what Dunwich represented, and no doubt accompanying the

choristers on their charity mission is to Lane’s credit;

nonetheless he maintains the community of silence around the

nature of the place, and prefers almost to laugh at its inmates -

albeit mitigated by his moral tale - than to attempt any

unveiling of its harsh realities. Although he is reticent at

quite delivering up physiognomic caricatures of the insane, it is

still hardly “Henry Harris” who has undertaken this voyage, but

the here rather snide journalist who invented him, comforting his

readership in the belief that an annual concert will suffice

these outcasts.

The recent discovery of poisoned meat on the Brisbane market

has led to Lane being sent to report on the Enoggera sales,49 the

source of most of the city’s supply, and an editorial of the same

edition considers his task accomplished.50 Whilst his intent is

clearly informative, he dispenses as quickly as possible with his

commissioned subject in order to justify the report as a Sketcher

column, commenting extensively not only on the state of the

beasts, but how the sales are run, the variety of buyers, the

presence of inspectors and the health regulations, the nature of

the transactions, down to the style of the auctioneer, in whom

the “dude” peeks through the informal dress. (This is a word

49 Brisbane Courier /Observer, Saturday 13th March 1886 (“At the Cattle Sales, Enoggera”).50 “From the description of the Enoggera cattle sales published in another column ofthis issue, it appears certain that the provisions made against diseased meat gettinginto the retail market through that channel are tolerably effective”; and “it is veryevident… that it is not by the indiscriminate sale of cattle at Enoggera that thepublic health is threatened” (Brisbane Courier, March 13th 1886).

that Lane has thus far confined to the larrikins of “the Valley

push”.) A stockman’s long shiny boots grab his attention, as

does the difference between the “fat-necked red-cheeked butchers

of the old type, and the sharp-faced, business-like butchers of

the new”. His usual desultory remarks are confined to the

attention granted a dog-fight, and the state of a couple of

“boiling” beasts, already enough the subject of ridicule for him

to let pass. The technical information is there, as is a

prerequisite of the work, mollified by the lightness of his tone.

For the job that it is, he gets by. But it is not his calling,

and he doesn’t have the strength or interest to make a true

“human interest” story of it.

For his next piece51 Sketcher invites us into the

technicalities and the intimate confines of the Chicago Police

patrol system, where, thanks to the replacement of gas by

electricity, the establishment of call-boxes on every beat, and

the organisation of a rapid-response group, the municipality is

saving “many thousands of dollars each year”, as well as reducing

the number of men required to police the city, and increasing its

protection. This love of order and military precision in the

United States will appear many years later, in his piece on the

Fire Department for the New Zealand Herald,52 but without the

pretensions that this article clearly has to first-hand

51 “The Police Patrol System”, Brisbane Courier /Observer, Thursday 25th March 1886.52 Op. cit., 19th January 1901.

knowledge. There is, of course, every possibility that Lane had

visited Chicago, even lived

there, during the five years he spent in the Great Lakes region;

however, had he accompanied the patrol in the manner the article

suggests, I feel confident that he would have said so, and

receive the work as an alloy of first- and second-hand

information, and Lane’s fertile imagination. (He gives names

to members of the patrol, perhaps as much to illustrate the

multi-lingual needs of Chicago as to suggest his own presence.)

It is nonetheless an efficient piece, designed more to provoke

admiration for the system than for the writer’s association with

it, and stimulated perhaps by the increasing concerns in Brisbane

about the behaviour of larrikins - the voluntary and involuntary

social outcasts among the male youths of the day - and their

incursion into the city centre from Fortitude Valley, the so-

called “Valley push”.

In “Bona Fide Travellers”53 Lane shows that his personal

attitude to alcohol is not militant or bigoted: he takes a trip

to a country tavern that is the favourite haunt of many

Brisbanites, only to report that the bona fide law - that only

genuine travelers are allowed to drink there of a Sunday - is

strictly enforced by the publican’s wife, and that, in spite of

the variety of beverages downed, nobody appears to get drunk, but

rather simply enjoys the outing and the drinks at its half-way

53 Brisbane Courier /Observer, Wednesday 31st March 1886.

point. Aside from his sympathetic descriptions of the patrons of

the pub, I retain this reference to the population prerogative,

couched in the terms of his racist vision, noting: “dogcarts…

choked with children, who prove that, in the far South, as in the

far North, the Saxon race obeys the Divine command.”

Sketcher turned to an American political theme for his piece

“Bossing the Party”,54 an indictment of American politics as he

saw it, only barely camouflaged in humour. Lane proves himself

to be something of a populist in his characterisation of bully-

boy democracy, without drawing a single parallel to Australian

political life, and in the sole apparent design to publish an

article based on personal recollection. From this point on,

there can be no doubting for his readership that Sketcher had

American experience, if not that he actually was an American, and

as Lane himself became noted for his Yankee twang, the identity

of this commentator would be becoming clearer to a wider group.

Interestingly enough, the incumbent president of the United

States, Grover Cleveland, was a Democrat - the first in a quarter

of a century - who had been elected largely due to his reputation

for honesty, and although there are no expressions of sympathy

for the Republicans in the article, the characterisation of the

Irish Democrats seems more directed at their party than at the

54 Brisbane Courier /Observer, Thursday 8th April 1886.

American political process, especially as Lane claims that

Cleveland owed his slender victory to the corrupt tactics of the

Tammany Hall institution in New York.55 After a brief hymn to

the farmers, “temperance almost to a man”, Sketcher sees American

politics from the microcosm of “river cities” - is this Lafayette

again? - and the undue influence of whiskey merchants, and he

describes a meeting for the election to public office “as I saw

it”, to show how American democracy functions. And we cannot

but be reminded, at the same time, that he was the son of a

drinking Irishman who was himself deeply immersed in popular

politics:

…the Irishman in America can hardly be called a goodcitizen from a political point of view. True, healways takes an interest in politics - a very livelyinterest - but he does not look beyond “Shure an’ isn’tJerry O’Callaghan an illigant gentleman; we’ll put himin, bedad, if we have to keep voting all day”. It ishardly necessary to add that Pat’s idea of an “illigantgentleman” is often founded upon the amount of “treat”Jerry stands, and the increased wage that Jerrypromises to obtain for corporation labourers. In manylarge towns the Irish are the main strength of the“dimmycratic” party and, leagued with the whiskey-sellers - for they always go against the temperance man- and the black-legs who abound in such committees…

Sketcher finds consolation from this sad state of affairs in the

responsibility that Americans exercise in the election of their

judges - “of all offices the American people hold the Judgeship

as sacred, and never throw out a Judge whom they believe does

right… drunk or sober” - and in the ubiquity of citizen’s55 It is true, nonetheless, that Cleveland only won after the New York vote had been counted, giving him victory by the slimmest of majorities.

committees, formed to combat the pressure tactics of the

railroading whiskey politicians; thus, in the river-town

elections that he goes on to describe, with a similar verve as

that shown in his recent description of a river-town newspaper,

the whiskey politician has his men elected for all positions but

that of Justice, and later loses the Mayoralty when “the dreaded

citizen’s committee started into life with an opponent whom all

men respected”.

“St. Helena’s Sunny Side”56 is a report on Brisbane’s penal

settlement, suggested in part by a recent comment in the London

Spectator that “men who have lived in Australia are never

sentimental about criminals”, and in part, no doubt, by the

recent trip to Dunwich, in which the island of St. Helena was

briefly visited. Far from the courageous exposé of the Brisbane

lock-up, this piece is en entire whitewash of the penitentiary,

wholly committed to the official discourse, unwilling to see

beyond the most superficial realities. Thus it is that the

crowding of certain cells is more a problem by its perpetuation

of “evils” than any consideration of the inmates themselves, and

the solitary confinement cells, dark and underground, are

represented in the context of their intended results, rather than

the slightest humanitarian consideration, “terrible, one would

think, to those who believe in ghosts and in retribution, and who

56 Brisbane Courier, Saturday 17th April, Observer, Tuesday 20thApril, 1886.

would see stealing upon them in the utter darkness the hideous

shapes of unpunished crimes.” The convicts are seen as a lazy

lot who don’t appreciate enough by far the pristine sea-side

circumstance in which they survive, the food, the rest, the

company. If voice is ever given to complaint, it is to those

poor warders who “say that they live with nerves constantly

stretched; one moment’s relaxation of vigilance might permit an

uncontrollable émeute”. Nowhere is the convict’s voice heard -

in fact it is painfully obvious that Lane has been given a Cook’s

tour of the island, with its “little grassy plot that might be in

the back yard of an Enoggera cottage” adjoining the hospital,

“the harmonious confusion [of] the yellow of the sand, the

emerald green of the grassy slope, and the darker hues of the

wood-crowned hills beyond”, and the “stout, hearty-looking men”

who “loll against a pile of boxes… with the greatest of ease.”

In fact, the only non-official voice heard is that of a sailor

bemoaning how unused to hard work the inmates are, and the

picture Sketcher paints of the convicts, in the quarries, in the

shoemaker’s and tailor’s workshops, is of a community given to

work as an escape from boredom, living an idyll in which

communication between them is almost a right. Suddenly the

crusader has disappeared behind

the pillar of society, suddenly the charitable journalist has

almost become a righteous government hack. In his former piece

on the lock-up, Lane made it clear that he was already a familiar

figure amongst the police, his disguise being so perfect that

they didn’t recognise him. Here we are under the impression

that he has given way to some form of pressure. Although he

does not go so far as to denounce the none-too-painful situation

of the convicts, one can hear his mute appeal to the outrage of

the good citizenry. Eighteen months later, the Board of Inquiry

into the prisons, lock-ups and penal establishments of Queensland

will re-iterate Lane’s observations, but without any disguises,

colouring them with the sulphur of scandal that is here only

implied.57

This impression is compounded by an unsigned article on the

Brisbane gaol in the Courier of the following week.58 In classic

Sketcher style it mixes a sober “recuperated” style of reporting

with a criticism that would be verging on an indictment if it

57 “Broadly speaking, the condition of all the gaols and penal establishments in thecolony has become feeble and nerveless. This is perhaps the result of a rebound toundue leniency from the harsh and cruel treatment to which prisoners were subjected inAustralia in the olden days. The… unnecessary luxuries provided for, and the generalease and comfort enjoyed by the inmates of almost all the penitentiary establishmentsrender, we are convinced, nugatory a considerable proportion of the vast expenditureincurred in the pursuit, detection, trial and conviction of criminals, and tenddirectly to encourage the growth of a criminal class. There is very little, forinstance, of a penal character in the life at St. Helena - not to speak of othergaols. The labour imposed is in no sense heavy; it is much less so than that doneevery day in the bush, on the railways, or in free workshops. In many respects it isnot even monotonous, which should be an element in all penal or deterrent labour. Theprisoners are better fed, we dare say, than many free labourers in the colony -certainly than the vast majority of skilled artisans in Europe. They have hours ofrelaxation, holidays, and half-holidays; they enjoy the unrestrained society of eachother at stated periods of the day, they have amusements in the shape of games,tuition if they desire it, and music to soothe them. If sick they are tended, and forthe time being they are without care.” (From the report of the Board of Inquiry,quoted in the Observer, September 3rd 1887.)58 “The Brisbane Gaol”, Friday 23rd April 1886 in the Brisbane Courier; Monday 26th April in the Daily Observer. The article was signed in the evening paper.

were not for the mitigating effects of the criticisms of the gaol

made by the chief warden himself. Attention is drawn to the

lack of activity, the poor rations, the mixing of all classes of

criminals, and the detention of the accused awaiting trial under

the same conditions as the most hardened convicts; furthermore,

there is evidence of the kind of over-crowding that had been the

crowning condemnation in the article on the lock-up. The prison

is praised for being spotlessly clean, and much space is given to

the discourse of the chief warder, who would prefer the “Belgian”

system of separation of prisoners - all prisoners therefore being

able only to speak with warders and with relatives - to the

current system of “propagation of evils”, and considerable

description of that “necessary evil”, the scaffold.59

Nonetheless, the writing is void of any of the sense of

identification that made the lock-up piece so powerful: Sketcher

is in no way in the habits of the prisoners as he was in those of

the drunken vagrant, nor does he manifest any intention of even

59 The report of the Board of Inquiry will find most gaols overcrowded, condemning theherding together and lack of classification of prisoners, the “defective organisationand administration” of the prisons, and the employment of inmates as servants leadingto “gross evils”, no doubt of a sexual nature, as is made clear in the case oftheTowoomba women’s prison. Lane seems to have been oblivious to the corruption ofthe warders and the sexual “depravities” described in the report, which implicatesBrisbane Gaol as much as those of Toowoomba and Townsville, and, incidentally, doesnot seem to take up the “Belgian” solution in its recommendations, which are concernedmostly with the construction of new and sanitary buildings, the creation of a PrisonsDepartment, the levelling of prison conditions throughout the Colony to thwart thecriminal class from choosing their place of internment, greater provisions forinspection and supervision, and, notably, the suppression of trafficking of opium,especially to aboriginals both in and out of gaol, which is “killing them off… morerapidly than ‘dispersing’ ever did”. (Observer, September 3rd 1887.) The general tenor ofthe report is to demand an overhaul of the system which would prevent the “manufactureof criminals”, and re-establish a proper system of deterrence, to the detriment of anattack on abuses - floggings, manacling, enslavement - inflicted upon prisoners bytheir guards.

imagining himself so clothed. If “St. Helena works a prisoner

comfortably [the comparisons to the subject of the prior piece

alone would seem to demonstrate Sketcher’s authorship], and feeds

him wholesomely; the gaol feeds him very little, and, generally,

does not work him at all”, the prisoners, like the convicts of

St. Helena and the outcasts of Dunwich before them, are visited

and viewed, objects of mild curiosity whose living conditions are

not much considered beyond such concepts as laziness, efficiency,

and just deserts. Captain Jekyll [sic], the chief warden,60

considers the present system a mistake, for taking in vagrants

and still not giving them work, and for mixing the young with

hardened criminals: “he is a man with ideas, is Captain Jekyll”

(an unmistakably Sketcherian turn of phrase) “as heartily opposed

to the how-not-to-do-it system as an official can be who has to

work under it.” So, despite the low rations and high prisoner-

to-cell ratios, Sketcher’s critique of the system is no better

than that of its principle executive, who flippantly dismisses

the abuses of habeas corpus in the name of punishing the guilty,

entirely seconded by Sketcher’s ending thought: “though little is

done with the prisoners, society is at least rid of them for a

time, for there is little chance of any escape.”

60 John Jekyll had replaced F. Bernard, the former Brisbane gaoler, who had beeninvolved in a suspicious street fracas in July 1885 (Joyce, op. cit., p. 123). Jekyllhad been sent to examine gaols inVictoria, which was no doubt the occasion of Lane’sdiscussions with him on “ideas”. There was another side to him, however, as reportedin the Courier six months later: Jekyll publicly confronted Bernard, “an elderly andfeeble man”, with having slandered his wife, the which the other denied; Jekyllthreatened to thrash him, Bernard became ironical, and Jekyll then beat the okler manabout the head with a carter’s whip, “vowing all kinds of vengeance”. Bernard wasquite seriously injured. (“A Serious Disturbance”, Brisnabe Courier, October 15th 1886.)

The Sketcher of the lock-up had the courage of his reporter’s

convictions to find out how things actually were - the Sketcher

of the three following pieces is more related to those naïve

observers in war-time who are given guided tours and official

discourses, and whose very presence condones the situation that

is the cause of concern. Has the Courier suggested to him that

his exposés might be toned down a little, so that the daily might

not be seen to be being too disruptive? And is it the shame of

such a come-down that keeps him from signing the article? Has

Sketcher decided to go straight, to join the establishment, to be

its comic relief and a pap to its conscience? Or is he just

trying on the garb? And does this explain the absence of his

signature?

As if to exemplify an uneasy mutation, in which the reporter’s

brief has moved from the human interest story, to the special

event coverage, to the exposé and its avatars, Sketcher’s next

article will be a complete return to his origins, described in

the first chapter - a report on a society ball.61 And as if to

suggest a waning star, the article does not appear in the Courier,

and will be the last for a whole month.

61 “The First Masque of the Season”, Daily Observer, Tuesday 4th May, 1886. (See LucindaSharp’s “At the Deutscher Ball”, Figaro, 25th July 1885 [Chapter I above].)

As a society report, this piece on a German masked ball is

well-constructed, and spotted with occasional observations,

generally comparing English and German customs: “the Briton is

too self-conscious, he imagines everyone is looking at him if he

doffs the waiter-like emblems of respectability”; “the German

girl can take her long-sleever and not be ashamed of it”; and the

opening definition, “the bal masque is something like frogs - a

delicacy to which the English never take kindly - but it

flourishes wherever the lively Latins have planted themselves,

and wherever the stolid Teuton has made his way”. In his

descriptions of the different costumes and his expectancy of “the

opportunity the masquerade offers for flirtation and more serious

intrigues”, Sketcher is in his element, and whilst his liberal -

for a teetotaller - attitude to alcohol holds good whilst the

Germans are being jolly, it hijacks the article as soon as some

larrikins turn up later in the evening, and turns to a trite and

no-doubt offensive moral, considering the obvious success of the

ball: “the habitues of Albert-street elbowed the honest German

girl and her Australian sister… and what was before a scene

of harmless pleasure, degenerated into a

scene that verged upon orgie… (…) … the dance became the

strongest sort of reason why none should masquerade, or,

masquerading, why the last note should be played and the doors

closed at one o’clock sharp…” The larrikins, the current scourge

of Australian society, arrive in time to bring out the wowser in

Lane, if not the very Englishman he had lampooned at the

beginning of his piece. And his approbation of “German” custom,

while a far cry from his hysterical campaigns of the First World

War, thirty years hence, is already ethnocentric and

condescending.62

His next piece is similarly regressive in subject, for, just as

a society report had engendered Lucinda Sharpe, so had a public

meeting created Sketcher; “The First Long-York Debate”,63 then,

covers a much-publicised encounter between the American radical

atheist Dr. York, and a staunch defender of the Catholic faith, a

Mr. Long, “member of the Glasgow School Board”. York,

apparently sponsored by the Freethinkers Association, had been

lecturing the Brisbane public for some three months already on a

variety of subjects made popular in the wake of the discoveries

and theories of Darwin and Huxley.64 In England the radical

freethinker Charles Bradlaugh, famous for his “without God in the

world” and his fiery mass rallies in Wolverhampton and

62 Among his later outbursts against thingsGerman, “it is the most infamous cultureever engendered and developed on this fair earth of ours for it makes a philosophy ofthat which is evil, a religion of that which is satanic indeed. It is Anti-Christ,this vaunted German ‘culture’. It is worse than Anti-Christ…” (New Zealand Herald,November 14th 1914.) And, ominously, “Chinese and Prussians have certainly much incommon…” (ibid., October 24th 1914.) (See Peter J. Bruce, op. cit., pp. 79-82.)63 Brisbane Courier /Observer, Wednesday 9th June 1886. A Courier editorial of ten monthsearlier (August 24th 1885), had warned that “Queensland…is likely to be overrun with asuccession of itinerant moral lecturers… At the present time the papers report theadvent of several male and female lecturers in the different colonies whose names havenever been heard of before but who have a mission either to reform Australians or torelieve them of that cash which they so freely distribute amongst strangers” .64 Including a lecture truffled with quotes from Carlyle and Henry George, “The UpperTen and the Lower Millions - Land, Labour and Capital”, in which he spoke for theworking man and against Chinese labour (Brisbane Courier, March 22nd 1886).

Northampton, in America Colonel Ingersoll and his notorious

question “why didn’t God kill the Devil?”, had generated a

veritable circuit of speakers whose following, whilst lacking

their rituals of pledge-taking, rivaled the meetings of the

temperance leagues. The debates between York - “the Ingersoll of

the West”65- and Long, brought about by the latter’s objection

to the sway that the freethinker currently held in Brisbane, were

six in number, running from the 8th to the 16th of June in the

Academy of Music.

Sketcher’s article is another minor masterpiece of faithful

reporting, impressions of crowd and feeling, and light comical

caricatures of the protagonists. Whilst he is mindful to

represent the arguments of the two speakers, who were clearly at

cross-purposes throughout the evening, he also gives a spirited

account of the reactions of the partisan sections of the crowd;

the most striking feature of the article, however, is the space

given to the ruckus caused by the attempted upstaging and

ambushing of the debate by the moderator, the Member of the

Legislative Council for the Valley, who “attempted to materialize

the thoughts which he had so painfully put together”:

“Sit down,” murmured [Alderman] Hocker, sotto voce, fromhis seat in the rear. A treacherous lull betrayedhim, and his old opponent turned on him in a rage.“Shut up, Alderman Hocker,” he howled, “I won’t allowno foreigner to tell me to shut up.”

65 Brisbane Courier, 14th February 1886. This “West” was no doubt California, which isperhaps another reason for Lucinda Sharpe not having heard of him (see letter 43 ofthe 19th June 1886, above).

Naturally, the confusion redoubled. Hisses, cheers,groans, and shouts were in order, of the last the mostpopular being that there are no foreigners inQueensland. Mr. McMaster glared at Hocker andrepeated that there were, and that Hocker was one ofthem. Dr. York, with his showman instinct, smiled;Mr. Long looked disgusted. Ultimately, the cry of“Debate, debate,” overpowered everything else, andthough the chairman attempted to persuade the audiencethat he wouldn’t sit down till they listened, heyielded at last, and introduced Mr. Long by pantomime.

Throughout, Lane admirably refrains from making McMaster’s

mistake, and contents himself with his sketching brief: “Mr. Long

is a venerable looking gentleman, type of a passing generation;

erect in stature, precise in motion…and does not keep touch with

the crowd”; “Dr. York… has the look of a well-fed animal… with

rather heavy features and short dark hair…[and] furrowed lines

running in all directions over his face”. Although he makes no

attempt to note the speakers, Sketcher clearly sees the one as

old-fashioned, lacking in relevance and stuck on stock answers,

and the other as “essentially American… the sort of talk that

goes down with nine men out of ten.”

Lane is not quite the Courier’s man in this business. Almost a

month before, the paper had published a scathing editorial on the

forthcoming debates, suggesting York was available to the

trickery of side-shows, and that all he had to do to get

attention was to send bogus letters of indignation to the local

papers to fill his lectures; furthermore, the Courier saw the

arrival of Long as being rather more suspicious than simply

fortuitous.66 Indignant letters did arrive, from a York

supporter and from Long, published respectively on the 14th and

15th, denouncing the accusation of collusion, and taking offence

at the editor’s view-point, which contended on the one hand that

atheists were great destroyers leaving nothing in their wake, and

on the other that the churches were all doomed to disappear

anyway; “our only hope,” the editor opined, “is that the

strongly-marked ludicrous aspect of the affair will mitigate its

evil effect.”67 Sketcher certainly stretched the comic aspect

of the evening, in the chairman’s attempts to upstage the

speakers, but nonetheless treated both York and Long to the

respect their audiences held them in,

rendered their line of argument in detail, and was not party to

the editorial’s charges of collusion and trickery, even as he had

been in regard to Booth’s way with crowds. On the day after

Sketcher’s piece, the editor once more took up the charge,

claiming that “the two speakers pass the time allotted to them

chiefly in putting up dummies and knocking them down to the

satisfaction of themselves and of their supporters”.

“Bullfights are still popular in Spain,” he went on, “and

exhibitions of poor humanity taxed to its uttermost are always

sure of a welcome…” Sketcher’s piece is neither as judgmental,

nor as serious, nor even as sarcastic about the affair as the

editorial, nor quite so unopioniated as the accounts published

66 Brisbane Courier, Wednesday 12th May 1886.67 The Brisbane Courier subsequently published a low-key and straightforward account of York’s lecture on “Education, love, marriage and the family” (May 17th).

anonymously on the second third and last debates,68 although all

three of these are not inconceivably written by Lane (the

editorial, on the other hand, seems to bear the hall-marks of

editorials written for the Courier prior to Lane’s arrival in

Queensland).

In summary, with his article “The First Long-York Debate”,

Sketcher seems to have re-found his footing, to have recaptured

the verve, the wry humour, and the intelligence of identification

with the protagonists of his piece, that had launched his career

almost a year before, and which seems to us to have been slipping

from his grasp in the last few months. Significantly, this

renaissance was brought about by a double return-to-origins,

firstly with a society ball report, then with an account of a

public lecture. His next piece, three weeks later, will also be

a return - to a description of a local factory.

“The Ipswich Woollen Factory”69 is as comprehensive a

description of a factory that its proprietors or the municipality

and local governments keen on its survival and expansion could

have hoped for. Long, detailed, accomplished in both technical

and common language, it lays out the complete process of wool

treatment from the raw product to the finished textile, replete

with facts, figures, and self-congratulations. For an audience

68 Brisbane Courier, 10th, 11th, and 18th June 1886.69 Brisbane Courier, Wednesday 30th June 1886.

that knew nothing of the different stages of wool treatment, it

would be as instuctional a piece as they could hope for without

illustrations; for those wanting to vaunt or see vaunted their

community or their colony, nothing would be left to be desired.

The only problem is, is that it is not a “sketch”, it is a piece

of industrial propaganda of a type to be made famous by the

propaganda films of the industrialised societies of the

twentieth-century. And, like these, it would be prefaced by a

pseudo-mythology that makes of the product the very basis of

civilisation, an aggrandisement that often works in context, but

that, when multiplied across a number of industries, becomes

inflated to the degree of the ridiculous:

Weaving was the first step of man in civilisation; heceased to be a savage when he discarded the skins ofbeasts… It is entangled with the legends ofMesopotamian plains… with stories of visitations fromthe gods… with the tales of the Fates spinning thethread which is destiny… and so the art comes down… tothe age when it was grafted upon the lives of theNorthern race, when the invincible legions were drivenback by the sheep-shearers…

Lane’s racism, which would be founded on an idealised version

of the “Saxon” race, is here seen in gestation, “grafted” onto

the very people who would become essential to his personal

political support base, the shearers; and he would flatter them

from the start with the epithets of his chosen race, and predict

their destiny as Australian:

They were freemen then, the cloth-clad Teutons, andfreemen ever since had been those who shear and spin

and weave. The Saxons who overrun [sic] the world… (…)But the days are long gone by when the Saxon “wife” satat the spindle, and when the village weaver withdexterous hand threw the shuttle among the meshes onhis loom. They passed before the steam-power even asEngland’s supremacy must pass now that the craft whichwas her mantle is falling into younger and morevigourous hands. … today Australia stands alone inthe breed of her sheep and the worth of her wool… (…)Here men hope to outdo the English cloth-factors asthey have outdone the English wool-growers.

As in previous outings,70 the piece ends on a sudden change of

(political) direction - “all this [the factory] has done with

free-trade, and yet the wool-factors of Ipswich want protection”

- with neither preparation nor follow-up. The effect is one of

surprise, a mild shock tactic that calls for an instantaneous

recapitulation in the mind of the reader of what had appeared to

be a simple and non-partisan sketch, as a politically-motivated

article in which, in this case, the position of the author is

unclear, but clearly strong.

It will be a full month before Sketcher signs another column

in the Courier, and, once again, we will be confronted with a

“return to the source”, with an article set in prison, and

concerning revivalism.71

70 The prior article finisheded, quite spuriously in the context, with “Then everybodywent home and the first Long-York debate ended at 10.10 sharp”, an apparent andunheralded reference to his contention about closing times in the article precedingit.71 “Revivalism in the Gaol” in the Brisbane Courier, “The Heathen At Our Door” in theObserver, Friday 30th July 1886. The latter title, ironic of course, appeared at thehead of a small and sarcastic editorial in the Observer nine months before, in which theagitations of the Rev. Griffith (“known to fame as the father of his son” - presumablyPremier Sam Griffith) to bring the good word to the “benighted” regions of the colonyare noted with some circumspection. (See the Observer, Wednesday 28th October 1885.)

Dr. Guinness, a YMCA revivalist preacher, had discovered on a

recent prison visit during which he “saved” eighteen inmates

that there was only one Bible on the premises, and, having vowed

so to do, returned for a grand meeting with a number of donated

holy books to be given out. Sketcher was on hand to outline

the proceedings, and did so with flair and a sting in his tail.

Hardly a paragraph passes, throughout the long article, without

some tongue-in-cheek aside, or ironic association. Thus

Guiness’s second in the prison is his “trusty henchman”; his

society “deluges the honest artisan with tracts of the Mary the

housemaid type, and offers books below cost price to those who

are perfectly able to pay full value”; the good doctor and his

man “entered the great gaol gates yesterday morning with bundles

of Bibles in their arms, and indignation in their hearts”.

This is Sketcher at his best, acerbic without being nasty,

scornful but still humane. The comparison between the well-

meaning and stage-experienced revivalists on one side, and the

convicts as their innocent victims on the other (and the warders

in between, non-plussed), is grand satire, and has the effect of

heightening the contradiction between the two parties, to the

honour of neither. And dotted throughout, little pearls of

irony: “proceedings should have begun at 10.30, but the man who

is twenty years ahead of time cannot be expected to be

punctual”; “[it] made the place look quite churchy by leaving

empty pews”; and this more reflective comment on the lack of

body in the prisoners’ singing: “it was not that any number

would not try - very few did not attempt to chant the familiar

words - but, somehow, men are not like the birds that sing at

bidding in captivity.” Lane’s description of the preacher’s

techniques, and his setting off the inside of the prison with

the everyday noises of the outside, is quite masterful:

Dr. Guinness is a cut and dried revivalist, one of thepreachers who play on the feelings, and reach the heartin defiance of the head. (….) But, though hecontrolled his voice, he gave full vent to the tricksthat add strength to the plea of the evangelist - thequivering voice, the sudden hush, the pronouncedgesture, and the personal appeal. And once, too, hegave his voice full vent in a rounded period that madethe echoes ring again, and frightened a little birdthat had perched on a railing of the scaffold, whichloomed ominously overhead. For the little birds comewheeling through the barred windows into the highceiled room, and bring in messages from the greenfields and from the unfettered sea… And when thedoctor’s voice lowers one can hear the merry tap-tap ofthe mason’s hammer… And when for one moment there is aperfect lull, voice and tools staying for a moment,there is borne upon the gentle breeze the pleasant humof children’s voices, the bubbling murmur from theschools just beyond the walls.

Here is the Sketcher who knows how to identify with the

oppressed, and who can see the engines of their oppression, even

if he doesn’t feel the right to spell it out. Nonetheless, in

an impassioned plea for these convicts - “not only men but our

brothers” - he asks where can they find an outstretched hand,

transparently ignoring the pantomime of help from the podium,

and searching for it rather in the devoted love of those

partners of the men who refuse to give up on their imprisoned

husbands. He pursues his description of the man who “entranced

his audience”, comparing in mock honesty his expressive appeal

with that of someone playing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” on the banjo.

Likewise his moral tales are “swallowed with great gusto by

everybody but the warders”; he recites verses of the Bible to a

“Hindostanee” in “Tamil” - “at least the doctor said it was”;

and finally there was the farce of the head-count of the saved:

Not to miss an item of the usual revival programme,those who were concerted on Sunday were requested tostand up. There were thirteen who complied, and asDr. Guinness had numbered seventeen on Sunday, he drewfrom the chief-warder that two had gone down to St.Helena, and that one was in the wash-house, whence hewould come soon. Being thus eased to any backsliding,the revivalist gave a short and characteristic address.

These are the things that interest Lane, and take precedence

over the - nonetheless present and believably faithful -

accounts of the intended message and effect. It is not this

religion that frees men, but the sun, the outside, the real

freedom of the body, as in the image of “a stray [sunbeam]

falling on the gray hair and beard of a very likely-looking old

reprobate, and transmogrifying his whisky-soaked countenance

into that of a halo-girded saint.” Sketcher seems to have

turned a corner here, maintaining his wry skepticism towards the

officers of evangelism whilst taking on board a cause himself,

implicitly that of the working man in the metaphor of the

convicts. “It goes against the grain for men to shout unless

they are free” he proclaimed, against the grain of the freedom

his rather ridiculous subject offered.72

The Mayor’s Ball was the object of an enormous spread in the

Courier, with guest lists, accounts of the ceremonies, a column on

dress designs, and a piece by Sketcher,73 just a year after his

first Brisbane article on the Commercial Rowing Club Ball in

July 1885.74 His elegant unsarcastic piece proves him at the

height of a simple wry style, completely in command of a

structure that wafts easily from the flow of excitation amongst

the arriving guests and their onlookers, through the mild

majesty of the unpompous yet grand occasion, to the common

dénouement of mayoral huzzahs. Lane is recognisable almost

everywhere in this work, for his turns of phrase and for his

mild jokes, designed as always to return the high and mighty to

more comfortable postures:

He stood there, did Mr. Mayor, at the crowning momentof his triumph, with the Knight-Premier on his left andthe Premier’s lady beside him. In front wasMephistopheles eating chicken, and a dainty little lady

72 Grattan Guinness was the eponymous son of a famous English evangelist. He began hisBrisbane mission with a mass meeting at the Town Hall on July 12th 1886, and wasfarewelled before 1000 people at the Exhibition Hall on the 29th. The Courier praisedhis “pure Saxon English”, no doubt to distinguish him from the Americans andoccasional Scot likewise on tour, and noted that it was rumoured that he had secretlymarried a “fair and wealthy Tasmanian lady”. (Brisbane Courier, July 13th 1886.)73 “The Mayor’s Ball - The Scene From the Gallery”, Brisbane Courier, Friday 6th August 1886.74 See Chapter I above, note 16.

in huntress dress, whose very smile made the municipalheart feel glad.

Nor did Lane divest himself of his social conscience just for a

night of fancy-dress, for if “everybody was there… which

includes all whom it is bon ton to recognise on the streets”, then

it was also

not exactly everybody, if everybody includes suchcommon folks as small grocers and butchers, schoolteachers, artisans, and the swarming myriadsconveniently termed the masses; but certainly everybodywhen everybody means Cabinet Ministers and municipalofficials, commissioners, departmental men, thrivingshopkeepers and big contractors, men who have servedthe people well and men who have served themselvesbetter…

A similar distanciated compassion is at work three weeks later

when he acquits the task of describing the Exhibition for the

evening paper,75 in a long, variegated and detailed description

of the people present, contending that “he who wants to know the

people of Queensland as they are must go to the Exhibition, and

read their ways and their weaknesses in that great book - the

crowd”. The piece is quite remarkable for its breadth, for the

author’s powers of observation and the efficient little strokes

that render a whole cross-section of the society, urban and

rural, making up Queensland at the time. Quite without

incident, only barely punctuated by acts and facts, it is at

times a mesmerising tableau, devoid of cynicism or prejudice, and75 Friday 20th Aug.ust 1886 (“The Crowd at the Exhibition” - does not appear in the Brisbane Courier).

at the same time not given over to mere flattery. Lane has

wanted to test his hand at describing this people amongst whom

he has lived now for just on a year, and he does so with

compassion, humour, and a grand sense of inclusiveness, reaching

even the larrikins and dudes, whose worst fault in this

circumstance has been to wait the longest at the horse-ring and

get the best seats. The exhibition - here described on a Bank

Holiday attendance - is as a great equaliser and harmoniser, in

which even the press of the 11,000 crowd escaping through the

inadequate exits at the end of the day is taken as a common

experience, exemplified by the woman struck in the breast, who

“swoons from mingled pain, fear and excitement”.76 “Everyone

feels good somehow” and all that is missing, in fact, is the

“alien”, present only in two subtle references, one in which the

Premier is referred to as “Our Sam” recalling the anti-Chinese

sobriquet “Ah Sam” popularised by the Figaro, and “in the fat

children’s tent one sees best the capabilities of the colony,

and get to understand how speedily young Queensland will

outnumber the alien if it be given a chance”. This “alien”,

supposedly, is a reference to the overseas-born population of

the colony, “the new chum [who] is always telling of the

superiority of the old country”, but evokes as much the unspoken

population, so different from the European peoples that we can

only surmise what would become of them in his hands after his

76 Over three days 45,000 paying visitors (plus members and schoolchildren on theirfree day) attended the Exhibition, which was held at Bowen Park (Brisbane Courier, 20th

August 1886).

treatment of the “German settlers from the Logan and from the

Rosewood scrub, short and squat compared with their Anglo-Saxon

compeers, and lacking that evident determination to be

respectably dressed which tells how our fatherland has risen

from the mire, and produces men, not beasts of burden”. This

is “like June in merry England”, and a celebration of Anglo-

Saxon Queensland, where nobody except one Irishman gets drunk

despite the prodigious amounts of beer consumed, where

temperance stalls cohabit sympathetically with bars, Social

Purity petitions with light ladies, “Nellies” with “’Arries”,

and office-workers with larrikins.

On August 25th Lane published an equally remarkable article,

this time on the Chicago anarchists, who were currently the

targets of odium even for such as Carl Feilberg, if indeed it

were he who wrote a recent leader in the Courier.77 Lane,

however, is brimming with personal memories, as well as with

compassion and understanding for the circumstances that produced

77 The editorial contended that Chicago’s refusal to support the extradition requestfrom England of eighteen months before, concerning the dynamiters of Westminster andManchester, is “poetic justice that she should so soon have been chastised by the samefearful weapon”: “Deluded by the leading towards Irish nationalism characteristic ofAmericans, it was commonly thought that the dynamiters in London used in a just causethe only weapons which England left them, while the Socialists, Communists andNihilists of the European Continent were sympathetically regarded as assailants of theautocracy, which the democrat hates. But the anarchist outbreak of Chicago has openedthe eyes of a people whose one great virtue is, that they are ready of resource andquick to act. They see with alarm that in their tolerance they have built up afaction whose very existence is a threat to the institution of property…” (BrisbaneCourier, July 21st 1886.) It is, of course, not impossible that Lane himself contributedthis leader, in the more “responsible” style that we recognise him for in this role,leaving his more personal thoughts for Sketcher’s pen.

such a hopeless cause.78 Although he denounces the “gloomy

doctrines and wild theories” of “Bakouine” - he miss-spells the

great Russian anarchist’s name at each turn, as if he actually

knows nothing of him - his intent is not at all to jump on the

band-wagon of opprobrium, but rather to enlighten his readers

with a personal account of the harsh life lived in the “Dutch”

quarters of the middle western cities, and on the way give them

- and us - glimpses of his American career:

The winter of 1884-5 was a fearful winter in theWestern States; hard times were aggravating thedistress always existing at that season, and theblizzard was causing terrible suffering in “Polacktown”. The daily papers took on the destitutionquestion, and a flood of light was thus shed upon thedeplorable condition of the foreign element. Therevelations made were astounding… With a littleBohemian girl as guide, who spoke English, German,Russian and Polish, as well as her native tongue, itwas my duty one November day, to report upon that veryDesplaines-street police district, which has won suddenrenown by the socialistic outbreak of its denizens.79

He describes the wretched conditions, the over-crowding, the

hunger and poverty, quite clear that the people were victims of

circumstance rather than their own natures; he praises their

resourcefulness and their resistance to the temptations of

alcohol; and he compares their condition with their hopes and78 “The Hotbed of American Anarchy”, Brisbane Courier, Wednesday 25th August 1886.79 Perhaps the severity of the social and seasonal conditions in the Great Lakes regionin late 1884 was the catalyst for the Lanes’ decision to emigrate. In any event, Lanewill make a second reference to a reporting assignment in the US in November 1884, inLucinda Sharpe’s letter of the 26th September next. Perhaps he was moved by nostalgia- or perhaps by a need to re-establish his credentials, or “touch base” - in suddenlywriting of what we suppose to be his first reporting assignments. (And we are nowconvinced that he had moved from Detroit to Chicago - although perhaps still beingemployed by the Detroit Free Press.)

with the arrogance of nearby wealth, in a passage that also

reflects, to a lesser degree, his own background, emigration,

and political awakening:

…they see, close at hand, the splendour and the gloryand the pomp of that Chicago which scatters gold likewater for the shame of its daughters, but for nothingelse to them. They remembered the hope with whichthey crossed the Atlantic, and memory adds tenfoldbitterness to the hopelessness of the present. Theyare driven to bay, as the French were when the greatrevolution shook the world; and in their despair theylisten to the fanatical preachers of Bakouine [sic].They ought to suffer silently of course; for they arefortunately few in number compared to the moreprosperous American labourer who stands solidly for lawand order. But none ever saw them in their denswithout recalling how Henry George prophesied that fromour great cities shall come the Goths and Vandals whothreaten civilisation.

This brave and enlightened piece is a revelation in the

mainstream career of Lane, for it shows: how far from the

extremes of the socialist spectrum he was (“for they are almost

entirely foreigners, the American anarchists are; and their

minds are warped with the knowledge of tremendous wrongs”); that

his Georgian thinking was already formed in 1884; how he both

commiserated with and feared the lumpenproletariat and their

more radical solutions; how his journalistic career had already

begun in the spirit of the exposé, of the pursuit of an

individual into the depths of a world that he was otherwise

estranged from; and how he was not afraid to face up to an irate

public opinion and present it with a side of its chosen target

that must force it to at least understand.

Two months later Sketcher is much more sedate as he gives his

account of a trip - once again in the Government launch the

“Otter” - to the Reformatory at Lytton80, but the institution and

its inmates don’t merit more than “then there was the

reformatory to be inspected” and “the reformatory boys were

something like the Longreach lounger, they didn’t see anything

unusual in the picnic party”. The announced subject is a

picnic held at the place by the West Moreton Teacher’s

Association, but this event, which overwhelms any of the unequal

investigative journalism of prior trips, is itself swamped by

Sketcher’s pre-occupation with the nature of men and women, and

particularly the latter.

It all begins with the characterisation of the “lonely

profession” itself, whose practicians are seen as outsiders whom

“popular opinion has not incorrectly got to regard …as

individuals who see about half as much of their kind as does the

average bald-headed eagle”.

He is not a dressy man, the average schoolteacher; heis not even neat in his choice of colours, nor carefulof the clothes he wears. He has a straight nose, ahigh forehead, a bright eye, and a touchy manner. He

80 “A Schoolteacher’s Picnic”, Brisbane Courier, Monday 8th November 1886. A comprehensivedescription of the reformatory had been published in the Observer on May 20th previous.

often affects a beard, partly because he thinks itadorns authority, and partly because shaving is anabomination. He is touchy; not rather touchy, orsometimes touchy, but always and invariably touchy.His work makes him. He is king, dictator, tyrant inthe schoolroom; to contradict him there isinsubordination… so he becomes impatient of opposition,and - touchy. He is jealous, too…

Clearly, Lane has taken an individual in the party as his model,

but the choice of this person strikes us as significant, if only

because these very moral attributes ascibed to this

authoritarian and petty model will be those ascribed to Lane

himself at the time of the rift in the New Australia movement,

ten years later.81 In fact, nothing could be as subjective, nor

as prophetic, as this most remarkable of projections: “the man

upon whom the future depends is a strange mixture of weakness

and strength, but his love for his work makes good his

shortcoming; never resting, never ceasing, he plants the seeds

of knowledge whose harvest is discontent and happiness.”

Likewise, when he turns to the female schoolteacher, the

portrait is too precise to be of much value as a description of

a profession, and one wonders whether his own wife, and the

future he and she had in store for each other, is not to be

found between its lines:

But the schoolmarm! She is simply indescribable, aquaint mixture of wisdom and folly, a curious compoundof boldness and bashfulness, a kindly, patient,impetuous girl, sharp-tongued and tender hearted. She

81 See Gavin Souter: op. cit., chapter 6 “The Crooked Ones Will Have To Go”, and chapter 7, “Starting Again”.

isn’t pretty… and is intelligent looking, rather thin,with a way of looking tired. (…) she has Englishnotions of womanliness, and so she is shy. [She is] agirl who knows and a girl who thinks, but a girl who ishampered by being a girl.

She is, moreover, “as susceptible as her weaker sister, and has

as ready an ear for flattery and as warm a heart for love” as

the coquette/loving mother that Lane describes all women to be,

and that Sketcher prepares to represent. For, of all things,

this piece is about women as he sees them, about the “country

schoolmarms [who] seemed to be sorry that being now swan with

swan they shone no longer pre-eminent”, about “the girl who

hails from the country… She walks with stateliness, she eats

with langour, she sits with a stagey grace”, and even about

those absent, “the lady teachers of Brisbane [who] were not

included…for, piqued at something or other, they had “boycotted”

the picnic…” And, given the context in which the picnic was

held, we cannot help but wonder what has become of the social

conscience of a journalist who won his stripes investigating the

inner confines of state institutions.82

The critical condition of this conscience becomes acute in the

following article on the Diamantina Orphanage,83 which is a82 Lane’s almost deliberate ignorance of the reformatory boys during his outing wasperhaps part of his brief, as the Courier had already published an unsigned article onLytton on May 20th, in which a glowing version of the strict discipline of theestablishment is bedecked with references to “evil natures”. It was backed by aneditorial in the same edition calling for a similar institution to be established forgirls, products of a “native-born vice”. Neither piece was of Lane’s style orlanguage. 83 “The Children of the State”, Brisbane Courier, Monday 22nd November 1886.

whitewash made blatant by the lionising of the children’s

Spartan regimen, as if they were the truly lucky ones, compared

with those in their family homes, who have to deal with choice,

caprice, and a higher (!) mortality rate. The tone of the

piece is set by the bizarre lyrical opening:

Six by the clock. Tired men still snoring, languor-loving [sic] women still dozing cat-like; the dew-bathed earth leaping into the sunshine, as Venus leaptfresh from the seafoam; all things glad, and allchildren waking. Waking! Ay, more than waking,being born to the only life they know - the life of aday! Waking to sing or to sob as the mood takes them…Running to pull papa’s hair with innocent impiety, orto snuggle down into the clasp of loving arms thatnever tire of petting! (…) That is how the childrenwake in the happy homes of Brisbane; in the Toowongmansion and in the Valley cottage, both alike. Andmuch in the same way they wake out on the Boggo-road,in the cluster of cottages that forms the DiamantinaOrphanage…;

from which point Sketcher describes the six o’clock alarum, the

martial organisation of cleaning until the Spartan breakfast of

bread and treacle, the indiscriminate uniforms, long school day,

spare meals, and complete absence of that very body-contact that

his own fortunate children apparently enjoy, as if they were the

pious image of all other children in their homes in Brisbane,

and this in the sudden amnesia of such unhappy homes as

“Bill’s”, described some months before. Oh lucky children

these, then, who “do not straggle awake at uncertain and

irregular moments” (they “rouse with a common impulse as the

great bell clangs for six”), who “work in squads, detailed off

and changed every week, and have about as good a time over it”

as the “too-pampered home-children”.

Something has happened to Lane. He has suddenly lost his

capacity to see beyond the thinnest of surfaces, and is to be

found throughout in a series of half-delirious contradictions,

in which the children of Brisbane are at once deeply-loved and

scorned for being so loved, and the parent-less ones identical

to them, even though unloved, and better than them, in having

less of the good things and more of the hard. This smacks at

once of the puritanical communism which Lane will later espouse,

and of propaganda, although it seems less here that he is doing

the work of the government, than that he is under the power of

the female director of the establishment, who he is at pains to

defend and laud, even taking up her cause in what is believably

her own words: “square faces and peaked faces, bright eyes and

silky eyes, all thrive together under Matron May’s constant

care, which, by the way, is rewarded by her being quartered,

with her family, in the worst-ventilated, smallest, and darkest

rooms in the place.”84

84 In the editorial on the Lytton Reformatory, the Courier had given the opinion that “aman ought to be at the head of [a girl’s reformatory] as being more able to win therespect and obedience of this class, as well as firmer in his discipline. Women aretoo much given to favouritism and to petty tyranny to be left in sole charge of aninstitution requiring great firmness as well as judgement”. No doubt an orphanageneeded more comfort than firmness, more nurturing than discipline. (See Brisbane Courier,Thursday 20th May 1886.)

Another unhappy off-spring of this experience of a Spartan and

authoritarian mini-society is a manichean proposition on human

nature which is almost a call for eugenics, and, given the

racism that is to follow, of an ugly foreboding:

There are tainted natures among them, of course, andtendencies to evil as to good, for blood tells, andvice lives long. Perhaps some day the pure younglives which are growing up behind ruddy-brown skins andstraightforward eyes will be weeded out from those inwhich wizen faces and blotchy skins betray a sorryparentage.

And weirdly, in support of this harsh society, Sketcher proposes

that “home children drop off in Queensland like wind-blown

roses”, whilst these children of the state who have “neither

cake nor croup, neither dumplings nor diphtheria, neither boots

nor blistered feet”, “unshod and uncaked, live and thrive”.

Perhaps the answer to his blithe and blind reporting lies in the

happy image that he conjures up for himself, of “these orphans

and worse than orphans whom the State is fostering, and a good

woman cherishing”. Perhaps it is the encounter with this

martially-organised mother-figure that has revived in him that

admixture of need and dread in the child, that can make of the

strongest intellect an absurdly dependent propagandist. “No

institution in the world can surpass this record,” he crazily

proclaims, “and no mother rears so large a proportion of her own

little ones as Matron May, of the Diamantina Orphanage, does for

Queensland.”

This time, however, he won’t go unchallenged. In a telling

article in the same paper, eight days later, “La Quenouille”, an

indentured columnist for the company’s weekly The Queenslander,

takes him to task for the lacunae in his work, and makes a

number of proposals for a kinder environment for the under-

nourished and unindividuated orphans.85 The columnist, probably

a woman,86 pays homage to Sketcher’s “encomiums”, and goes on to

make a number of recommendations for the orphanage, from

replacing the mattresses, to supplementing and varying a diet

that dogs are known not to survive - “is fruit all forbidden in

this Paradise?” - to allowing the children to have their own

clothes, including shoes. On a number of occasions the writer

addresses Sketcher directly, in a manner that makes it clear

that she defers to him87; throughout her sense of indignation is

transparent, she having visited the establishment before Lane,

and written in the Queenslander two days prior to his article a

piece on the abuses which she “ felt sure a more trenchant

writer could deal with in such a manner as to ensure speedy

reform”. And it was not only that “these matters had not

impressed him at all so painfully as (despite much in other

85 “‘Sketcher’ on the Orphanage”, Brisbane Courier, Tuesday November 30th 1886.86 In the course of the piece the writer seems to be suggesting that she is a woman. Aquenouille in French is the stick on which raw materials are wound prior to spinning,the suggestion being, perhaps, that of a centre for spinning gossip. Tomber en quenouilleis a derogatory expression for a man who has come under the undue influence of one ora number of women. 87 The sense of “Toujours perdrix, you know, ‘Sketcher!’“escapes us; “why cannot the bigsoup copper be filled with good potatoes ‘in their jackets’ one morning, with riceanother, and with that great invention of the most hospitable nation on earth - Irishstew - perhaps once (lest ‘Sketcher’ quote against me ‘more curricles!’) once a week”seems more clearly pacifying.

respects pleasing) they had done me”, but that “some details

which I had refrained from mentioning seemed to have escaped his

notice”, and in particular, the foul state of mattresses stained

with the sweat of children who were purported never to suffer

fevers. She concludes, none too favourably for her colleague:

All that “Sketcher” says in praise of the matron I havealso said; but, as for the children, I saw none half sorosy as his description. Queensland home-childrenlike “wind-blown roses”? I have seen them out West infencer’s tents, travelling with their father’s teams,in stockman’s huts, in station homesteads; on the Downsand here near Brisbane; and if I had thought the littleDiamantina children looked anything like so well asthese I should have been comfortably reposing in my bedat the present moment instead of writing this letter.

In definitive, it seems to us that Lane’s judgment was

impaired most of all by his own political agenda. His brother

John claimed that William had announced his intention to form a

communistic social experiment soon after his arrival in

Australia,88 and I believe - speculations on the influence on him

of the matron apart - that he saw an image of this society in

bud at the Diamantina Orphanage. The blindness, the denial,

that obviated its shortcomings and its hardships, the clear

difference between appearance and reality - Sketcher goes so far

as to say “the system followed throughout has the rare

peculiarity of being for work and not for show” - belong most of

all to his determination that a society ruled from above, based

on work and co-operation, and living sparely and with a88 Souter, op. cit., p. 18.

primitive innocence, was not only feasible, but the destiny of

mankind. His revolt is against the “too pampered”, against

luxury and langour, and the sight of these willing children,

whose terror of abandonment and deprivation was no doubt much

closer to the surface than he wished to see, seems to have on

the one hand awakened him, and on the other sent him into a

reverie, to the detriment of the journalist. Sketcher will not

contribute another of his articles to the Courier or the Observer

for a full month, and even then only on the occasion of

Christmas.

Paradoxically “Christmas Eve in Brisbane”89 marks a turning-

point in the maturation of Sketcher’s prose, representing, as it

does, the ruder aspects of life in an economy on the down-turn.

Painting a large fresco reminiscent of the “Saturday Night”

series, Lane ambles down from his Spring Hill bungalow into the

heart of Queen Street on Christmas Eve, following “the great

human tide” of 10,000 people in its last-minute preparations

for, or advance celebrations of, Christmas Day. “It isn’t a

pretty place, Queen Street. It is narrow, dirty, hilly… There

is hardly room for the tramcars to move when an antiquated ‘bus

passes on either side”: this is the voice of reaction to the

metropolis, but it is mitigated by Lane’s own characteristic

form of excitation - “but for all that it is the heart of the

city, the centre of the colony, and is well worth seeing when it

89 Brisbane Courier, Saturday 25th December 1886.

throbs”. He sees many strangers in town, and notes the

difference in feeling from the year before, swelled by “the

fever of speculation” (if not his own enthusiasm for his then

first Australian Christmas) with the present “sickly throb”, the

season “saddened by lack of work and need of funds”.

This is a finely constructed piece, juxtaposing the depressed

aspects with the ribald, the romantic with the tragic, and along

the line placing its faith, not in the religious meaning of the

time, but in the simple virtues of lives made frugal by hard

times. This technique is telling in its capacity to convey

both the visible and the invisible, spelt out plainly in the

following passage:

There were strangers in town by the hundreds. You metthem at every turn, saw them drunk at every bar, heardthe unsophisticated language of the harmless bushmenabove the hubbub, and saw the trusting farmer beingroped in by nickel-plate stores and loud-voiced streetpedlars. But, to balance this, there were manystaying quietly at home, who should have come to swellthe crowd and spend their gold. One or two are notmissed, but the thousand men who can find no work inBrisbane make a big gap even in a Christmas Eve crowd.

He then goes on to describe the delights of children, the

picking and choosing of presents and

the “sacrifice in every coin, the divine self-denial in every

piece of currency”; suddenly a bereaved young girl like an

orphan out of Dickens appears, wanting only to buy a wreath,

which a kindly shop assistant makes possible for her, a little

Christmas Story à la Sketcher of “a choking throat, but a

thankful heart”. Then we pass on to the “bearded mechanics,

spruce clerks and white-trousered labourers”, meeting their

wives then leaving them for the bars, where, with the bushman,

“labelled by his rough beard, brown skin, and careless dress”,

they brought on the “bad side of Christmas”, or “how the average

Australian likes to celebrate”. And so on to a panorama of

“limp-wristed” barmaids, frenzied drinking, staggering, singing,

lying in the gutter, delirious talk, and the general patience of

the police and the crowd, which begins to dwindle as the last

trams career out of town, leaving some “gay and attractive”

shops that “people took pleasure in gazing in and choosing what

they liked but couldn’t buy”. The mood seems to change on the

street corners - “it is strange how quarrelsome crowds are when

things are hard and money is tight” - and in Albert Street there

was the “sin and shame and sorrow unspeakable” of the un-named

sex trade.

Immediately following this perambulation through the first of

Dante’s circles, we are summoned to the relative paradise of a

Spring Hill cottage where “everybody was happy” decorating the

little house with branches of eucalypts and evergreens “just as

they decorated the English home in the years gone by”, a family

of “suppressed exclamations” and children looking after each

other, where “everybody seemed glad” even if “it might … have

been dull in the uncarpeted room”. This is Lane dictating to

Sketcher, and at the same time allowing the journalist to have

his way; and this is the message, oft-repeated, of course, but

full of intent here: that “happiness is a thing that all the

wealth in Queensland cannot buy, not even on Christmas Eve”.

The article ends on a strange sombre note, with a paragraph

about a dying friend “with yellowing nails and, and with flushed

skin clinging close to the skeleton head”: “it was only a year

ago that he and I had “done” the town together, rambling through

the crowded streets, and philosophising over the mysteries of

existence, as most men will when they are strong and young”.

The identity of this character remains obscure, and Lane’s

tribute to him is moving, a little horrific, and not altogether

in context with his piece. There is little doubt that this

friend was a fellow-reporter, whose presence at the beginning of

Lane’s professional life in Brisbane would have had considerable

significance for him, if not been an essential support to his

developing career. And for Lane, it brings on his only

reference to Christmas as a holy day, and takes him back to his

own surest ground, mother-love:

He didn’t philosophise now, that belongs to the periods

of “scoops” and reputing [sic], of bars and barmaids,

of bright eyes and red lips, and of ninepenny midnight

suppers in the coffee-stalls of the Bight. He looked

now through the passion leaves at the gathering

darkness, and saw beyond the veil of stars the God-

Christ whom Australia hails on Christmas Day. And

whether this is philosophy or not matters little, so

long as it strengthen the brave loyal heart when life

ebbs slowly away, and so long as it soothes the loving

mother whose children have fallen one by one into the

silent grave.

The following week, on New Year’s Eve, Sketcher had another

article published, this time in the Observer only.90 A

description of a night of boxing, the greater part of it is

devoted to a fairly ordinary blow-by-blow description of the main

event, a match between a sailor and a professional, that the

sailor was touted to win, but who eventually went down to his

wilier rival. The article is unexceptional apart from the

subject itself, which is only barely a Sketcher brief. The

occasional witty allusion - the Salvation Army band next door

playing “Battling for the right” - the descriptions of the crowd

and the protagonists keep his integrity intact, as we learn that

the police and the press are “the two eyes of society”. More

ominously, however, is the setting and the timing, for Sketcher’s

New Year greeting also contains a prophecy: black clouds hovering

over a fight.

90 “A Fight to the Finish” (Observer only), Friday 31st December 1886.

In fact, his next outing will be about what many considered to

be the gravest social problem of the time, the often violent

social outcasts and delinquents then known as larrikins.91 He

opens, in fact, with what may be the most complete definition

ever of this social phenomenon, gleaned from his Queen Street

interviewees:

What is a larrikin? Ask a dozen different men and patcome a dozen different answers. The boy who runs thestreets; the lad who likes a lark; the boy who isbeyond control; the youngster who stays out at night;the fellow who stands at corners and insults passers-by; the idle good-for-nothing who “sponges” on hisfriends; the ‘Arry; the rowdy who may or may not work;the dreg of humanity who frequents Albert-street andshares the wages of sin; the dressy young fellow whowould rather steal than work, but is too cowardly to doanything but pilfer.

In a way, this is Sketcher’s greatest contribution yet.

Although there are some confusions, although there has been too

little thought given in the beginning to the portent of the

conclusions, as if, in fact, they had simply grown out of a long

monologue like a unexpected plant, Lane’s treatment of the

subject is remarkable for its humanity, its lack of prejudice,

and the scope of its argument. All of these demand

reproduction, as the following quotations demonstrate, starting

with Sketcher’s debunking of the commonly-held belief that

larrikinism is a class phenomenon:91 “More about Larrikinism”, Brisbane Courier, Wednesday 19th January 1887. Although theword “larrikin” is obsolete in the sociological sense, it maintains a stronghistorical presence in Australia, and is still used as a term of affection. Itsetymology, as explained by Sketcher in his tenth “Brisbane Saturday Nights”, is in thetranscription, in a Melbourne court, of a police officer’s claim that the accused hadbeen “larr’kin’ about”. (See the Brisbane Brisbane Courier/Daily Observer, 25th Feruary 1886.)

Anybody who has any acquaintance with Brisbane musthave noticed from what varied and opposite classeslarrikins come; a leading Freethinker and a leadingminister, a prominent politician and a thriftlessimmigrant, never acclimatised, a fat-salaried civilservant, and a hard-working plodding “Quelp”92, may anddo jostle in the possession of larrikin sons. Men whothrash their boys and men who don’t; comfortablematrons and snoodless girls; folks who have snugly-furnished houses and folks who haven’t; those who ownland and those who rent; and even parents who interestthemselves in their children; all these grow larrikinboys - an occupation so truly democratic that even thesnobocracy of Brisbane share it.

Not everyone shares his view, neither at the time, or today.

A Bulletin article of 1881 puts the larrikins clearly in a lower

class93, and Noel Maclachlan points to their “social and economic

disadvantages”94; what’s more, Sketcher’s article (“More about

Larrikinism”) is in part a response to a prior piece by his

friend and colleague, the poet Francis Adams, whom he takes to

task for his recommendations of more outdoor life, cultural

events, and artistic education, and who responded in biting

fashion in the paper two days later.95 In fact, Sketcher’s

92 Member of the Queensland United European Labourers Protective Association.93 “The Larrikin Residuum”, in The Bulletin, 8 January 1881; cited in C.M.H. Clark, (ed.):Select Documents in Australian History, 1851-1900, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1962, pp. 686-688.94 N.D. Maclachlan: Larrikinism in Australia, unpublished thesis, University of Melbourne; cited in C.M.H. Clark, op. cit., p.686.95 “I am a little surprised that our good friend ‘Sketcher’, whose clever journalismoften touched with intuition…we all must admire so, should have enlisted himself inthe matter of larrikinism and its causes, in what I must be pardoned for calling thenoble army of tinkers. The results are to hand in a couple of columns of readablematter, a little confused and inconclusive, and also (what we were scarcely preparedfor) a little dull…” (Brisbane Courier, Friday 23rd January 1887.) Adams, whose articlewas also under the heading “More About Larrikinism”, was clearly piqued at Lane’sscorn (not so much as not to join him at the Boomerang at the end of the year,

viewpoint appears somewhat confounded by his prognostic that

divides the “larrikin boy of well-to-do parents”, from “the poor

man’s son”, the former being “easily cured” by “piano, pictures,

garden, intellectual company… give him a happy home, and keep him

in it”, the latter being disadvantaged by “lack of inducements”:

“how will you replace the whip which is broken, and which no law

can mend?” If the rich man’s son is so easily persuaded to

return to

the good life, one could argue, then surely his life as a

larrikin is much more ephemeral than the poor man’s, tipping the

sociological balance over to the class definition. Lane turns

to the world around him, however, rather than to theories, to

illustrate his version of the phenomenon:

This was brought home to me most forcibly by seeing thelife of a larrikin lad, the son of an honest hard-working neighbour. The lad was fifteen or so, andalready stayed away from weeks; when he crept home,ragged and penitent, a terrific thrashing always provedthat my neighbour did not spare the rod and spoil thechild. Yet he was not a bad-hearted lad, nor evil-hearted, nor extravagant. Had he but a bright necktiehe went contentedly in shirt and trousers; he munchedat dry crusts on the vacant lots, and then lay smoking,his feet kicking in the air, and his hat over his face.The whip of necessity had been broken, and nothingcould replace it. He did not have to work, and whyshould he?

however). Adams’ original piece, published on the 10th January, was accompanied by aglowing editorial, and followed by a shower of letters, which he had already respondedtwice to before Lane’s contribution. It was, one feels, his domain, and both he andLane - who had also been lionised in an editorial once - come across as enviousrivals.

Lane seems to believe, then, that it is the bountiful nature of

the economic conditions in Queensland that lead to larrikinism,

rather than hardship, and this just after his observations on the

scarcity of money at Christmas. (And, astonishing for us, he

seems not to accuse the brutality of the child’s home-life, being

more or less in collusion with it by endorsing the violent

proverb, and by making of necessity itself a flay.) Lane has an

eye for a picture, though, and paints it in a manner that remains

strikingly cogent to the Australia of a hundred years further on:

I used to picture this lad to myself lying on thehillside where the cool breeze crept over, his simplemeal ended, his more than teetotal instinct satisfied,his pipe alight and his whole being soothed by thedelicious weed even while his body basked in the sun.Then to picture below his honest labouring father,toiling with pick-and-shovel to drive a road throughthe hill, every bit of clothing drenched with sweat;drinking deep draughts that never quenched thirst;broiling and aching between the pitiless rock and themore pitiless sun - all for 7s. a day, bound to go inways the larrikin boy could not admire.

The picture is translucent, and gives light to the aspect of

larrikinism that was not simply delinquent or outrageous, but

belonging to a hedonism entirely recognisable as Australian.

The sense of identification with an unformalised yet essentially

political act, based on what we might call a “counter-cultural”

revolt, is testimony to Lane’s capacity to identify with his

fellow humans, and Sketcher’s keen rendition of what was

invisible to other observers. “He simply threw up his hands and

struck,” he says. “I sympathised with him.”

This, however, is not necessarily a tribute to Lane’s humanity,

as Sketcher pursues with a condemnation of “the foolish and

criminal negligence of parents” who let “larrikinism develop in

their children until eradicable”, without quite spelling out what

the “eradication” process might entail. His discourse becomes

all the more confusing by seeing this “genuine larrikin instinct…

imitated in hundreds of poverty-stricken homes”, and then

pointing the finger at culture and climate:

It is merely a case of satisfying one’s desires at theleast expenditure of energy, and if his desires are notexcited by strong emotion the Australian will becomemore and more disinclined to exertion.96 The climatedevelops larrikinism, and must keep on developing it.

He then attempts to make comparisons between the larrikins of

Australia and what would be their equivalents in other parts of

the English-speaking world. The “licence of unadorned liberty”

in America creates an irreverent youth, but “the fact is the

climate does not develop [larrikins]”; likewise “even the

Californian hoodlum is very different”, and the tramp as well,

there being, in his view, no room between the worker and the

thief for this sub-strata to develop. As for their English

counterparts, they are “ill-trained and mismanaged”, and although

Sketcher claims that he speaks “positively of Western America”

and only “from vague knowledge, supplemented by considerable

enquiry, of England”, we can’t help wondering how much of the

following passionate indictment of English custom is not part of96 Who can refute such a prediction in a country where it is still common to hear as parting words: “don’t work too hard”?

his own very real experience, as a boy in Bristol who ran away to

sea at sixteen:

Crammed at school, hectored at home with the hectoringwhich English custom considers parental; their betterinstincts often depressed, not encouraged, by thecanting Puritanism which sees evil in merriment andhoofs in the card-pack; a large proportion of thoseEnglish boys whose parents “see to them” are so “seento” that they regard escape from home as a liberation.

Sketcher’s conclusions are contradictory, because he is drawn by

his own logic to the socio-economic argument against the content

of his own scene-painting. Perhaps, in fact, the political

convictions of the man Lane, from which Sketcher’s brief has

until now been successfully defended, have come under such recent

pressure as to force this breach in meaning, as the distance

between the activist and the columnist narrows:

There are homes in Brisbane where song and dance wakeevery night, where, where mirth and card-playing fillthe pauses, and where juvenile bookworms can devour atease their much-loved knowledge. Mother’s love isthere, and father’s guidance; irreverence is not known,for are not all equal in such republican homes?… andfrom one of those homes I would stake all I hold dearestthat a larrikin never grew. Schooling may help suchhappiness by imbibing its nature, by cultivating thegrowth of higher thoughts which must all be good; butwhat good is this to the man who earns 7s. a day andfears to be unemployed?

Here so many of the streams of Lane’s thought and character

come together, from the labour sympathiser, to the republican,

the educator, the utopian - for is not this description of happy

Brisbane homes an ideal? - and even the inverted martyr, who will

indeed sacrifice - not so much himself, but “all he holds dear” -

and more - in his attempts to prove a social theory.97

Sketcher’s next article, however, is a complete volte-face.

“Sunday Night in Queen-Street”98 begins with a long and lyrical

passage that seems to have been a response to the challenging

praise of his style by Francis Adams, a sort of geo-eroticism

about “the cool close of a rainless day, with a sea-blown breeze

fanning away the humid heat that still exhales from the earth’s

brown bosom swollen with the downpour of waters, bursting into

fruition beneath the hot kisses of the eager Queensland sun”.

Condemning the “morbid care of a prudish board” that closed the

park gates of an evening, and prevented the people from

“worshipping Beauty” by crowding them onto the respective

“shilling” and the “half-crown” sides of Queen Street, he returns

to one of his favoured pastimes, crowd-gazing, fascinated as

97 Interestingly, the Brisbane Courier ran a small article entitled “Brisbane Larrikins atWarwick” reprinted from the Argus on the same page as Sketcher’s article, and in whichthree young men, “all bearing evil-looking countenances of the larrikin stamp”, werecharged under the Vagrancy Act. They were accused of “lurking” and “loafing”, and aswag containing a few stolen haberdashery items and purported to belong to them wasproduced. For their part, one claimed to have just arrivwed from Tambo seekingwork,another there only twenty-four hours before from Toowoomba, whilst the third wasclaimed by the court to be a “professional pedestrian”. They received six monthshard labour at Toowoomba, as revenge on that town for having sent one of them. Onesaid in parting that if all the unemployed of Warwick were arrested its prison wouldbe full, another that the next time he went to gaol it would be for something,suggesting perhaps that the line between the worker and the criminal was closer inQueensland than Lane cared to think.Letters to the editor on larrikinism printed below this article referred to “the tideof iniquity”, a “wide-spread malady”, and contained stock answers of the Freethought(“religious hypocrisy”) and Christian (“lack of charitable works”) varieties.98 Brisbane Courier, Wednesday 23rd February 1887.

always by the rites of flirting and “love-making”, to the point

of an almost exquisite vicarious pleasure, especially in the

intermingling of the “good” girls with the “bad”:

…no mistake is greater than to suppose that all thegirls who go to Queen-street are necessarily “fast”.Perchance many tread a slippery road as all girls dowho leave the home-circle, and true it is that onQueen-street they rub cheek by jowl with the fallensisterhood whose very existence shames men andthreatens women.

As for “the worthless larrikin who ‘chyacks’ with scant reverence

whenever he safely can”, he is to be divided amongst two classes,

and “those who saunter are generally of a better stamp than those

who lounge”. “Queen-street is [the young ladies’] reception

room, for want of a better,” he gauges, “and it is a shame that

they cannot receive therein without being stared at by roués and

insulted by larrikins. (….) It is bad for Brisbane that the

young folks should be left alone in their Sunday-night-

pleasuring, but it is worse that the scarlet women and the black-

souled larrikin should be permitted to intrude where the people

delight to gather.” And, as if to gratify Francis Adams

completely, at the same time as banishing the larrikins from

political significance, he makes the poet’s suggestions for

betterment his own:

Men cannot be driven to church nor from Queen-street;but they can be led to saunter where the Beautifulwhich humanises has full play, where the breeze-blownbranches and rustling leaves chant in harmony, andwhere the rippling of the river echoes the refrain.They only go to the narrow closed-in street becausethere is nowhere else, yet thusly and thusly their

tastes are degraded and their love of the beautifulweakened.

Over a month will go by before his next article,99 a return to

reporting a society event. Curiously, however, it resembles no

other Sketcher article to this point, neither in style nor

vocabulary, which are both much closer - exaggerated vernacular

apart - to those of “Lucinda Sharpe”. A very long and detailed

description of the speeches given at a YMCA gala, it lacks

entirely the Sketcher stroke, even though it appears at times to

attempt to imitate his vocabulary, by the occasional but

unconvincing classical or Biblical metaphor. In fact, virtually

the only interest that the article holds for us is this enigma of

its authorship, made all the more striking by Sketcher’s

signature appearing, unusually, in inverted commas. Had a ghost

writer covered the event for him? Had he risen to the challenge

of a colleague to try and pass for Sketcher? Had he lost track

of “who” he was, and slipped into a Lucinda Sharpe style

unwittingly? Or was, in fact, Lucinda Sharpe Annie Lane, at

least at times, and was it she who accounted for the gala evening

in Lane’s stead? Of all of these the last seems to us the most

plausible, simply because the presence of Lucinda is tangible in

every paragraph, and we imagine that Lane would have been aware

enough of his different journalistic personae to have made the

correction in time. Unless, of course, it had been fully

99 “The YMCA Gala Night”, Brisbane Courier, Wednesday 30th March 1887.

intended that Lucinda Sharpe cover the event, but that the piece

was signed over to “Sketcher” at the last minute due to his

prolonged absence in the columns of the Courier.

Again it will be over a month before Sketcher contributes

another of his articles, once again on a religious meeting,100 one

of his now characteristic assignments since the days of the

Temperance revivals, almost two years ago. This time it is

another Booth who is the leader on the night - although not in

person, and Sketcher offers no comment on the apparently now-

forgotten revivalist - as the Salvation Army conducts a meeting

to raise money for the establishment of a women’s house, in which

to receive the prostitutes they intended to save. The account

of the meeting is as straightforward as imaginable, but

nonetheless clearly Lane’s work, with such phrases as “she sang a

solo also, did ‘Captain’ Watkins”, and the flowery phrasings of

sentiments easily identified as his in the opening paragraph:

Over in South Brisbane, out at New Farm, up on RedHill, and down in the Valley, Lais, the stillbeautiful, set her house in order, and waited not invain; in Albert-street Lais, the fallen, drowned indrink her departed glories; on Queen-street viceflaunted itself unblushingly; on George-street the“privateer” plied her trade in defiance of the law.And sadder still in many a heated, gas-lit workroom,sad souled girls learned that if the punishment of viceis heavy, the reward of toiling virtue iscorrespondingly light; and saddest of all, little

100 “To Rescue the Perishing”, Brisbane Courier, Tuesday 3rd May 1887.

children whom the fates which are circumstances havealready doomed to that hideous Moloch into whose fieryarms society flings its weakest, laughed still pure andinnocent upon their mother’s knees…

Lane’s meaning is clear: that the economy of itself offers no

leeway between what he would consider to be the worst moral

situation of woman - prostitution - and the best, an honest

toiling mother or potential mother in a happy, loving home. At

the same time, he gives no more encouragement to the

Salvationists other than reporting their initiative, and

restraining himself from laughing at them. No doubt such is a

sketcher’s brief; however we feel the strong presence of the

social reformer, unannounced as he is in this place, at this

point.

An editorial on the same subject in the Daily Observer the

following day101 bears enough hallmarks of Lane’s writing for us

to presume his authorship of it, and presents us with the

opportunity of examining what differentiates Sketcher from Lane

the editor. In the editorial, his advocacy of the cause taken

up by the Salvationists is total, and given in the name of a

certain analysis of the etiology of prostitution, whereby “once

[the prostitutes] stood on the threshold of womanhood, as proud

and as maidenly as the daughter of any citizen ever was”, and in

which “although their very misery is a plea which cannot be

denied - nine out of ten of the women of Brisbane have been more

sinned against than sinning, have been the victims of101 “The Army to the Rescue”, Daily Observer, Wednesday 4th May 1887.

circumstances which society should control”. Although he asks

the question of how they “fell”, he refrains from either

answering it, or pointing at the “sins” or “circumstances” he

claims to have engendered it - in fact, for a writer so convinced

of both the source and the solution, he offers specifics on

neither, preferring to simply suggest his own omniscience, and

the absolute need for financially supporting the Salvation Army’s

programme:

There has been a lot of mud flung at the SalvationArmy; but all must confess who know its work that it isa movement which gets at the masses, which bothorthodox religion and modern philosophy pass smoothlyover. (…) It is the poor that the Salvationistsseek, just as Christ and Wycliffe and Wesley soughtthem… (…) Their love for their ideal is likeCophetua’s love for the beggar maid, like theNihilist’s love for his cause; it makes them the equalof the highest - it makes them lowly even to the dustwhen they meet those who sin.

And, typically, he charges at “the Puritan, who slew the scarlet

woman”, proclaiming that the Salvationist is his “opposite”, and

then claims that the only way to save the prostitute is to give

her love:

Of this we feel certain. There is no other means atgetting at the social evil in Brisbane, and there couldnot possibly be a better one. It is sympathy, love,an all-filling passion crushing out the miseries, whichnow they drown in drink, that our fallen sisters need;and this they will get in the Salvation Home.

Such an editorial would have no doubt been a great boon to the

cause, and would have believably won Lane as much support for his

paper as for the Salvationist crusade itself. As a writing

style, it is unmistakably Laneian, replacing the required wryness

of Sketcher’s articles with a forthright indignation, backed by a

romantic, almost revolutionary ardour, in which the positive

reference to the bomb-throwing Nihilists is remarkable.

Finally, even in the more sober garb of editorialist, Lane

remains a choice subject for psycho-analytical interpretation,

for if ever the fantasy of “saving the fallen woman” was visibly

an attempt to visit upon her the very stuff of her demise, it is

so here, where he wants to “crush” her misery with his “all-

filling passion”.

A month later, Sketcher will report back on the progress of the

Salvationists. In the meantime he contributed an article on

commercial fishing that would buffet his growing socio-economic

view-point.

“About Fishes and Fishers”102 is patently the result of wide

research, for Lane shows in it a sound knowledge of the varieties

and habits of the numerous Moreton Bay fish, and the common most

efficient ways of catching them. This, however, is only a

102 Brisbane Courier, Thursday 26th May 1887. A long letter on the need for a fish market and regulation of the industry had been published two weeks earlier (“Our Fish Supply”, Daily Observer, 10th May 1887).

background to the most political article written to date in this

column, for his object is to expose the mafia-like protection and

price-fixing rackets of the fish-hawkers, whose practices keep

this abundant food-source from being widely available in

Brisbane, and prevent the establishment of a fishing industry.

Clear in the picture it paints, lucid in the argument it

develops, the article is wholly devoid of the figures of speech

and pseudo-classical language habitual to his “sketches”; in

fact, an unusual sense of mastery of subject-matter, and

responsible sober thinking predominates. The hawkers, while

exposed, are not subject to vitriol, perhaps not even to the

slight degree as the Chinese, who make their first appearance in

his column, for their taking undersize fish, and selling “up

country”, as he claims, “[works] immense havoc”, although

presumably more to the established hawkers than to the other

fishermen, who are already constrained by their own masters as to

the size of their catch. Thus, although the Chinese fishermen

aren’t blatantly abused by Sketcher, it is nonetheless clear that

the honours of the story go, implicitly, and from top to bottom,

from the deprived Brisbane housewife, to the underdeveloped

Queensland fishing industry, to the trapped

fishermen, and then to the mafia of the European hawkers,

followed by the Chinese fishermen and their own hawkers.103

103 An item in the Observer of the 5th of September 1887 will note the prosecution ofChinese prawn fishermen for using oversized and fine-meshed nets, as well as statingthe common nature of the problem, and the difficulty regulating it.

His recommendations are simple and realistic: the opening of

fish sales to free trade, the establishment of a fish market in

Breakfast Creek in an area already recommended by fisherman, the

building of cool-rooms, and the like fitting-out of fishing

boats. Lane has in heart a regulated Queensland fishing

industry, with canneries and open supply lines. At this point,

he is an informed and visionary activist, with a local political

career beckoning.104

Less than two weeks later, he returns to the column to report

on the work of the Salvationists,105 and once again we witness a

mutation in Sketcher’s style, as Lane’s outrage grows. Almost

completely absent are the flippant asides or winks and nods, for

Sketcher has now firmly taken sides against the criminal element,

and for the redemption of the “lost” women at all costs. The

heroes of the piece are indubitably the salvationists, who manage

not only to bring a large number of the fringe group in to their

generously-laden supper, but, surprisingly, go away with “four

young ones, all under 20, plucked from the burning”. And the

villains are the “ultra-larrikins” - a term that seems to

describe those amongst the “loungers and loafers” who have gone

over to crime, and their minders, women “who had passed through

104 A month later, the “principal fishmongers, fish hawkwres, and fishermen of Brisbaneand suburbs” presented a petition to the Toombul Divisional Board for theestablishment of a fish market at Breakfast Creek (Daily Observer, 30th June 1887). AFisheries Bill in this sense will be presented to Parliament by Dickson on the 3rd ofAugust (Brisbane Courier, 4/8/1887).105 Brisbane Courier, Tuesday 7th June 1887 (“The Rescuers at Work”).

the fire and come out on the dross-heap, with beauty gone from

their faces and grace from their forms forever, and with all good

thoughts scorched out of being, or if lingering still buried out

of sight beneath the ashes of a wasted life”. The caricature

becomes almost farcical, however, when it comes to the men, as

Sketcher turns towards a strange eroticism:

their faces were flushed, and bloated faces shoneapoplectically scarlet; in the eyes of the bulliesthere was a dangerous gleam, started by anger, fed byliquor; even their moustaches bristled to order overtheir heavy sensual lips…

This was not the “laisser-faire and cynical satire of the Albert-

street rowdy”, but the “righteous

anger against an unwarranted attack upon their rights and

privileges… of these pariahs”, and the stage is set as in a

mummer’s play, with the devil and his works to one side, the

saints and the angels to the other, and in between the souls to

be saved. The Salvation Army major gives a speech “more fatherly

than one could dare to hope for”, bringing some to tears, and

then a captain newly-promoted from the street trade gives a

testimony in the girls’ language that generates its own moral

tale of a soul that was lost being able to help another to

safety:

And - would you believe it? - that picturesque,imperious-looking lass, who would not kneel, droppedher face into her hands at the parting prayer, and hidas best she could the emotion which, for a moment,swayed her. The cruel mouth relaxed, the strongthroat worked nervously, and through the long slenderfingers a big tear-drop found its way sparkling under

the gaslight like the priceless jewel which in God’ssight it was. Yet when she raised her head all thishad gone, except that she cast down the black eyeswhich before had been so bold, and that her nose, withits wide nostrils, looked as though a giant had pinchedit. And when an unwieldy one would have gone tointerfere between a fair-haired penitent and thelassies who were striving to force their loving careupon her, this cruel-mouthed courtesan stepped betweenand coolly bade the harridan to “come along and let theyoungster alone.”

Finally, we can’t help thinking that where “Marys” are tending

to “Magdalenes”, Jesus himself must be in the vicinity, and

wonder how unconsciously identified Lane was himself at this

point with the figure of the saviour.106

One week later he witnessed the double hanging of Ellen

Thompson and John Harrison of Port Douglas, condemned for the

murder of Thompson’s husband. His article107 in the Sketcher

column leaves no doubt as to his belief in capital punishment,

the “necessary murder for murder”, but leaves the reader

106 The paper was obliged two days later to publish an apologetic correction: “Miss, or‘Captain’ Carter, in narrating her experiences, gave ‘Sketcher’ and others in theaudience the impression that she meant to say she had been rescued from the ‘mire ofsin’, in the special and limited sense peculiar to that meeting; whereas, she onlymeant the application of the term common among professedly religious people. The factis, that the lady was a perfectly pure-living, hard-working girl when she joined theArmy, and her references to her employment were entirely to honest industry. We are,however, bound to say that the erroneous impression was confirmed in the mind of thereporter by the reference to owing £3, which has a special significance among theclass for whose benefit the meeting was held…” (“A Painful Mistake”, Daily Observer, 9th

June 1887.) Apart from expressing his “regret”, and noting that “the work is goingon bravely” (nine girls billetted), Lane is at pains to assert that his vision of theconverted prostitute was not a question of him taking his fantasies for reality.107 “Two Lives for a Life”, Brisbane Courier, Tuesday 14th June 1887.

confused as to his attitude to hanging, and shocked at his calm.

Throughout, of course, he is “sketching”, rather than judging,

but he personally entertains none of the doubts around the

woman’s guilt that some other onlookers apparently do; for

Sketcher, she was a “murderess”, perpetrator of a “vile crime”,

on whom he saw “the drawn and haggard face… of a woman whose

life had been spent in ceaseless toil”. Ellen Thompson had for

some time protested her innocence, written letters, an

“unprecedented conduct”, according to the Courier’s more official

reporting of the execution, on the same page as Sketcher’s, that

had “created a great deal of public excitement”, especially

concerning her “frequently expressed determination to resist all

attempts to hang her”. Sketcher’s version is much less

compromising: “She had been brutal and violent, giving free vent

to the bitterness of a despairing heart, shocking all who heard

her with her blasphemies, and deafening the ear of mercy with

unseemly cries”; her dignity at the end, however, inspired him

to a certain admiration. Nonetheless his rather clinical

descriptions of the unusually gory event give the lie to a cold

hatred, made all the more grotesque by a long passage at the end

of the article, in which he reproduces the “science” of a

phrenologist permitted to measure the victims’ heads:

…in the woman combativeness and destructiveness wereboth large, the domestic affections were fairly full,the animal or selfish propensities were full, the moralpropensities were small, and sexual love - amativeness,exceedingly large. In Harrison combativeness wasexceedingly large, destructiveness large, amativeness

rather small but tending to sensuality, as shown by hisnotably heavy lips. His domestic affections weresmall. Judging from this it would seem that the womanwas the moving spirit in the plot, and that her passionfor Harrison inspired her. She was active, cunning,and masterful…

Sketcher’s prior portrait of Harrison had noted “a peculiar

face, with rather receding forehead, and with bushy eyebrows

which almost met, and… heavy sensual lips”, a recurring trait

amongst his damned. And whilst he writes that during the

interval between the two executions that “in every man’s mind was

the conviction that whether the death penalty be right or not,

hanging is a barbarous and brutal thing”, he later considers that

“beyond these unfortunate accidents [both hangings had brought

blood], the executions were perfect of the kind”. And he

supports his cause by a detailed explanation of the processes of

this death, not, of course, as a sketcher, but as a student of

the legal doctor, just as he was of the phrenologist, reproducing

their words in his own fashion. This macabre article, chilling

in its details, is faithful, to a large extent, to the sketcher’s

brief. It is nonetheless horrific, at once for the awful

details, and for the author’s rather detached interest in them:

“had it not been the duty of officials, doctors and reporters to

see it all over,” he proclaims, “the crowd would have melted

away” before the second execution. But his article would

certainly not have suffered had he himself left, sickened.108

108 A sub-leader in the Observer a month earlier had protested against the “barbarousarrangement “at the prison which put the gallows in full view of the condemned intheir cells: “the strongest believer in the death penalty amongst us would scarcely

His next piece, published three weeks later, would be his last

such column for the Brisbane daily.

“An Evening with some Girls”109 rounds out his Courier career by

returning to the subject of a religious meeting, this time the

second annual meeting of the “Young Women’s Mission Class” at the

Baptist mission in Wharf Street. Laced with puffs of irony, its

aim is to give a light portrait of some puritan daughters and

sons testing the edges of constraint, and finding their way,

somehow, to the kind of amorous interplay that Sketcher rejoices

in. Along the way, however, he sends their little community a

few little barbs - “plumpish matrons to whom the world had been

kind and the clothes-makers attentive”, hair “adorned with the

captivating bangs that one earnest preacher denounced recently as

“Jezebel-like””, and the reverend who mounted the podium to put a

stop to a “sad cat-call”, contented that he had “done his duty

and had thereby escaped being confined to oblivion. More

acerbic, however, is this rather scornful comparison:

approve of torturing a prisoner before slaying him”, wrote the editorialist. DailyObserver, 16/5/1887. If this was Lane’s work, perhaps we must put the shock of theexecution at the cause of the clinical nature of his article on the hangings. Aleader in the same paper a few days later will promote an “extenuating circumstances”clause in rape cases to make for fewer hangings (ibid. 20/5/1887). Once again, if thisis Lane’s work - and we can at least surmise it to be condoned by him at this point -then his attitudes both to the “protection of women’s honour” and the “ultimatepunishment” were considerably more nuanced than Lucinda Sharpe, for example,represented them. Granting extenuating circumstance punishable by penal servitude orlife, he argued, would be a greater deterrent than the hope of having one’s executioncommuted, and even though “female virtue is more precious to a people than the livesof strong men”, the “average man or woman knows full well that… criminal assault maybe extenuated”.109 Brisbane Courier, Wednesday 6th July 1887.

There is something so commonplace and depressing aboutlocal sin and sorrow and degradation, and something soattractive and inspiring about similar sadnesseslocated 6000 miles away. That is probably why theformer is left to the enthusiasts centring around theSalvation Army, who seem to have a knack for gettingwildly excited about their own kith and kin; and whythe heavy missionary work, the attacks upon othersystems of morality, and the assaults upon the socialconditions of other races are supported andcountenanced as staple virtue by most of those who sitin high places and who make a point of doing good in anunquestionably respectable manner.

Thus it is that a Miss Plested “is storming the zenanas of

India on behalf of the Baptist girls of Brisbane”, a mission

whose “original membership of twenty-one had swollen in a year to

fifty”, and “whose object it is to point out the error of their

ways to their deluded Hindostanee sisters”.110 In the meeting,

however, the girls “had such excellent fun” collecting money

“that they had to stop and talk about it a lot, not to speak of

dropping at spasmodic intervals into snug corner seats… there to

work off their delight in echoing whispers and ear-pleasing

ripples of laughter”. And once again Lane sets to watching how

young women and young men conduct themselves in each other’s

company, firm in his own convictions:

They got flushed about it, but not a bit flustered; forwoman is in her element when she feels herself admired,

110 Lane’s sarcasm for Protestant missionary zeal in India is perhaps generated infamily folk-lore: one of his father’s brothers, converted from Catholicism with therest of his generation in Dublin, went to India “in a fruitless attempt to win overthe Hindus to a narrow form of protestantism”. (These words, although written byLloyd Ross, were probably John Lane’s. See Lloyd Ross, op. cit., p.25.)

and most of the Baptist girls are morally sure ofadmiration, seeing that the Baptist boys can admireneat figures and pretty faces…

Interestingly enough, the mission was formed on the 21st of

July 1885, the night Lane went to hear Booth speak, giving

occasion to his very first article the day after; whether or not

the mission was founded as a result of the enthusiasm the

revivalist inspired, or in rivalry to it, we do not know, suffice

it to say that Lane/Sketcher insists on coming full circle before

leaving the Courier, a sign of due preparation for a complete

separation.

Finally, when Sketcher opens with the sentence “there is a

tolerably well-defined difference of opinion as to whether it is

best to work from Jerusalem or to work towards that emblematic

point”, he is ostensibly referring to the question of doing

missionary work abroad or amongst one’s own people; nonetheless,

Lane’s own political agenda and the dilemma that it will pose for

Australian labour politics is perfectly encapsulated within it,

that is to say, whether it is better to reform society, or, as he

will prefer, to go straight to the desired point by creating a

“New Jerusalem” that will revolutionise the world by its very

example.

(b) Conclusions

Although the press of the day in Brisbane was full of

commentary, nothing is equivalent to the place that Sketcher

occupied in his “free” columns, one of descriptive moral story-

telling and investigative reporting. I can identify forty-five

of these “free” articles that were written for either or both of

the Brisbane Courier and the Brisbane Daily Observer, and one for the

Queenslander, that were signed “Sketcher”, plus five unsigned

articles that we can reasonably assume were written by William

Lane. These fifty “Sketcher” articles were published in the two

years between the 22nd of July 1885 and the 6th of July 1887, that

is, from three weeks after Lane’s arrival in Australia, up until

about four months before he left the Brisbane Newspaper Company

(his last known article for them was published on the 29th

October).

These articles quickly assumed the form of a column without a

title, but having a character of its own, as if the simple

Sketcher signature sufficed, much in the way of the great

American columnists of the day. However, for a few months,

between the 8th of December 1885 and the 25th of February 1886, a

more regular series, “Brisbane Saturday Nights”, was trialled, to

the number of ten articles.

Of the fifty articles, at least eleven were devoted to meetings

on religion or the work of religious organisations, and of these

eleven, four were among the first five Sketcher articles, and

four again among the last six, making of this subject the

beginning and the ending of the column in the Brisbane dailies.

Eighteen of the articles can be attributed to visits, six of them

to functions, five to business enterprises, four to institutions,

and two “private” visits. Another nine we could call intimate

stories, with five crowd scenes, three exposés/analyses, and a

final four articles touching on American subjects.

It is clear that there was a brief for this column, partly

suggested by the editorship, and partly self-imposed, that

approximated the type of writing prevalent among the American

syndicated columnists of the ilk of Mark Twain and Luke Sharp,

currently enjoying international popularity. Its tenets had to

with the human interest, and a skeptical eye cast on organised

religious endeavour and general do-goodinesss, with a propensity

for observing, if not interpreting, the hypocrisies seen to be

native to these movements. It would also seem, in Sketcher as

in Twain, Sharp and others, that the hypocrisies were to be

viewed more with the kindness - if not the condescension - that

philosophy allows human folly in general, a sort of genial

stoicism, that lets the reader be a part of the joke by being

apart from the subject in the same way as the writer, through a

repetition of knowing winks and nods.

In Sketcher’s work, this assumed common ground often takes the

form of attitudes to the young, and in particular to young love

and its half-learned half-invented rituals; elsewhere, his

consideration of women, his at times overbearing sympathy with

them, either in their lot as “fallen” women or as worry-torn

mothers, is the thread that provides a pattern to the anarchic

affect of cynicism. At times, and in particular in his analysis

of larrikinism, his capacity for identifying before judging

brings out a great strain of humanity in him, albeit brokered by

other prejudices no doubt invisible in the cultural climate of

his times. The courage of such independent thinking is a spur

to his imaginative style, as it is to admiration in the reader,

and it is no doubt this same courage - perhaps trifling to a more

open society - that caused him to bring off his greatest

journalistic coup of this period, his arrest for drunkenness and

vagrancy, and the subsequent sensational exposé of the Brisbane

lock-up.

This courage seems to abandon him at other times, however, in

particular when he is with an established group, as at the

Dunwich asylum, or the reformatory, where his choral group and

school-teachers seem to morally prevent him from moving out of

the skin of the society columnist, into the greater destiny that

“Henry Harris” promised. Likewise, either his own utopian

predilections, or something about the persons involved at the

orphanage, the St. Helena penal colony, the Brisbane Gaol, and at

the hanging, blinded him to the obvious horrors and abuses that,

in some cases, were writ large for other observers.

There can be little doubt that this column achieved

considerable notoriety: the organisers of the Booth mission were

full of praise for, and later shocked by, the writer’s raw power;

the “Night in the Cells” was apparently the sole cause of a

greater distribution of the paper it was published in, as well as

having been published in at least one other leading inter-

colonial newspaper; and the references to Sketcher by “La

Quenouille” seem to indicate that Lane had already achieved a

magisterial position at the Courier through the talents expressed

through this pseudonym and by this column.

Similarly, the column attempted to be at the vanguard of

certain local current affairs, being in part responsible, for

example, for a whole movement of prison reform. At another

level, it can be seen as a long-range barometer, taking on the

aspect of a sort of social-conscience check, although not always

in the direction of truth, but rather at times condoning

unsavoury practices. On the other hand, pieces that

investigated trade practices from cattle sales to bona fide

drinking, could result in such efficient analyses as that on the

repressed fishing industry, full of sound research, responsible

criticism, useful suggestions for reform, and, of course, the

courage it takes to expose vested interest.

The more intimate, human aspects of the column were dominated

by a romantic Victorian attachment to the “good” sheep and the

“bad”, in which the “bad” women were invariably redeemable, the

“bad” men not. In fine, Sketcher’s contribution to the social

debate turns around the magical qualities of the family that is

endowed with a loving mother and a respected father, without any

deeper appreciation of personal psychology or family dynamics

that is by no means foreign to other writers of the general era,

from Balzac and Eliot to Dickens. In fact, in spite of human

beings taking centre stage in most of the articles, in spite of

the depth at which Sketcher wishes to look into them, psychology

is all but foreign to the column, except in the melodramatic and

manichean forms of popular fiction.

The column also seemed to have been the meeting-place for a

certain type of local patriotic propaganda, in which Queensland

factories were exposed to public understanding in their most

positive and productive lights. The writing of these pieces is

usually humdrum - unsurprisingly for the subject matter - broken

up by occasional high altitude flights of classical fantasy, and

by the apparent use of a foreign, lesser hand. They seemed to

have been contrived more out of necessity, if not duty, than the

column’s original spirit of commentary, although they did not

necessarily tarnish the reputation of a writer endearing himself

to a population keen to have its own institutions placed on an

equal footing with those of England, if not with Homeric fantasy.

Finally, it should be said that Sketcher introduced a

considerable element of eroticism into his articles. Sometimes

this is direct, as in his descriptions of demure but ripe young

damsels, of boys bursting with sexual energy, as well as his

vigorous portraits of the bush- and working-men he found so

attractive. At other times it is in a lower voice, or inverted,

with his constant returning to the Albert Street population of

prostitutes, pimps and larrikins, and his physiognomic

interpretations of criminal sensuality.

There can be little doubt that the name “Sketcher” derived from

the title of the first of his articles, “A Night with Booth: A

Sketch”. That this title in itself owed something to Dickens,

whose Sketches by “Boz” helped engender that great career, seems to

be validated by the association of the Sketcher column with that

novelist in the introduction to the first of the “Saturday

Nights”. Sketcher’s debt to Dickens, as, no doubt, to the

Mayhews and a whole generation of English slummer journalism, is

as obvious as it is unmeasurable, for the subjects broached, his

melodramatic and romantic treatment of them, and the purported

place of the writer in the scenes he described. Like Dickens,

Lane constructed his early career around parliamentary reporting,

then began a series of “sketches” for a morning paper and its

evening sister-paper.111 The literary merits of the great

novelist notwithstanding - the range of his vocabulary, the power

of his characterisation, and the complexities of his plots - this

place of the narrator in the discourse is a fundamental

difference between Sketcher and his model, however. Left

largely unresolved by Lane, whose lithe reporter pursues his

subjects, and then merges unnoticed into their worlds, Dickens

allows his narrator an acknowledged space between the

protagonists.112 In Sketcher it becomes a fundamental flaw that

forbids any evolution of the writing, maintaining the

relationship with the subject as being of a magical nature, and

thereby interfering with its basic credibility. That Lane soon

tried to immerse himself physically into the world he was

describing must be seen not only as an adventure in investigative

journalism modeled on the courageous actions of Stead on behalf

of the Pall Mall Gazette, but also as an attempt to resolve this

contradiction, with a temporary and spectacular success in the

111 Dickens’ work on the Morning and Evening Chronicles began in 1834 with a numbered seriesof “Street Sketches”, followed in 1835 by the “Sketches of London”, the “Sketches byBoz, New Series” in 1836 (all numbered), then “Scenes and Characters” for Bull’s Weekly(see Michael Slater (ed.): The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism, Volume I, Sketches by Bozand Other Early Papers, 1833-39, J. M. Dent, London, 1994.) Lane would appear to haveimitated this procedure with the “Brisbane Saturday Nights” in the Courier and theObserver, then more assiduously in the Boomerang, with the continuation of that series,then the numbered “Daylight And Dark”, “The Outcasts of Brisbane”, “Glimpses ofBrisbane”, and “Leaflets From Life”, 1888-9.112 Master Humphrey, the narrator of The Old Curiosity Shop, for example, finds Little Nelllost in the street, takes her home, returns there the next day to witness the openingscene between the old man, her “brother”, Swiveller and Daniel Quilp, then excuseshimself of his readers and continues the narrative as an omniscient character withinit. “And now, that I have carried this history so far in my own character andintroduced these personnages to the reader, I shall for the convenience of thenarrative detach myself from its further course, and leave those who have prominentand necessary parts in it to speak and act for themselves.” (End of Chapter 3.)

Brisbane lock-up, which then fizzled out for the psycho-physical

pressures that the continuation of such a conspiratorial

procedure would have obviously produced over time. To this

degree we can perhaps overview these articles according to the

following approximate chronology: an American-style humorism (the

Booth articles and their progeny); a Dickensian period (the early

“Brisbane Saturday Nights”); the investigator (from “Henry

Harris” to factory descriptions); followed by an eventual return

to the American form. Patently, none of these are as clearly

periods as the first is, there being many overlaps; nonetheless,

the rhythm of such a view helps us to see how Lane struggled with

the medium, experimenting in a way that is absent from his work

as Lucinda Sharpe, or with his “Labour Notes” column. Perhaps

the key to the heteroclite nature of these articles lies in the

kind of interface that they demanded between the writer and the

world of his description, the pressures brought to bear on him by

a world of complexity and contradiction, foreign to the

certainties of the labour movement or Lucinda’s prejudices.

Perhaps the great misfortune of these contradictions is to be

found in the short life of Henry Harris, whose exciting career

will itself only ever remain in sketch form.

The Sketcher columns in the Brisbane papers, both the “Saturday

Night” and the non-generic series, were a lively engagement with

the socio-cultural phenomena of their day: temperance movements

and licensing laws; prison conditions and reform; the vagaries of

the revivalist movement, and the humanistic societies that

countered their frenetic meetings with serious debate; the

general well-being and hypocrisy of a self-contented population,

followed by the darker evolution of a growing economic down-turn;

the tide of the happy crowd at play, and the fringe life of

larrikinism and prostitution; and some of the ordinary pleasures

and sadnesses of a new population, in which the enthusiasm for

the country taken up meets the nostalgia and occasional tragedy

of the land left behind. Lane knew well how to touch these

chords, being doubly an immigrant, an acute observer, and a man

of sentiment, and having the talent and the inventiveness - and

no doubt the American education - that brought Sketcher into

being.

c) Appendix: a list of “Sketcher” articles in the Brisbane Courier, Daily and Evening Observer, and in the Queenslander113

1885

SC1 Wednesday 22nd July (“A Night with Booth: A Sketch”

- unsigned).

SC2 (?) Monday 3rd August (“Saturday Night Scene” -

unsigned, Observer only).

SC3 Tuesday 4th August (“A Testimony Meeting: A

Sketch” - unsigned).

SC4 Friday 7th August (“Booth as a Boy in Blue”).

SC5 Monday 1st September (“A Temperance Fizzle”).

SC6 (?) Thursday 8th October (“Sketches of our Street

Arabs” - unsigned, Observer only)

SC7 Tuesday 8th December (“Brisbane Saturday Nights -

I”).

SC8 Tuesday 15th December (“Brisbane Saturday Nights -

II”; signed “Sketcher in the Courier” and subtitled

“After the Races” in the Observer).

SC9 Saturday 19th December (“30: A Study of

Mississippi Life”, ‘written expressly for the

Christmas Queenslander’).

SC10 Tuesday 22nd December (“Brisbane Saturday Nights -

III”; subtitled “Run In” in the Observer).

113In spite of a number of these articles appearing in papers other than theCourier, I have used the expedient of cataloguing them under the generic “SC”.Only one of these articles appeared exclusively in the Queenslander (SC9,19/12/1885). All of the others appeared in both the Courier and the Observer,with the exception of SC2, 6 and 36, in the Observer alone. Six - SC16, 18,19, 25, 34, and 37 - appeared in all 3 papers.

SC11 (?) Friday 25th December (“Christmas Eve in

Brisbane” - unsigned).

1886

SC12 Friday 1st January (“A ‘Hallelujah’ Wedding”).

SC13 Monday 4th January (“A Night in the Cells: A

Reporter Among the Drunks”).

SC14 Tuesday 5th January (“Brisbane Saturday Nights -

IV”; subtitled “A Quiet Wedding” in the Observer).

SC15 Tuesday 12th January (“Brisbane Saturday Nights -

V”; subtitled “The Lonely New Chum” in the Observer).

SC16 Thursday 14th January (“A Queensland Foundry”).

SC17 Wednesday 20th January (“Brisbane Saturday Nights

- VI”; subtitled “The Fallen One” in the Observer).

SC18 Thursday 21st January (“Mr. Kates at Home”).

SC19 Wednesday 27th January (“Brisbane Saturday Nights

- VII”; subtitled “Johnny’s Happy Home” in the

Observer).

SC20 Monday 1st February (“How Ice is Made”).

SC21 Tuesday 2nd February (“Brisbane Saturday Nights -

VIII”; subtitled “Bill’s Unhappy Home” in the

Observer, Wednesday 3rd. February).

SC22 Wednesday 10h February (“Brisbane Saturday Nights

- IX”; subtitled “Behind the Scenes” in the Observer).

SC23 Monday 15th February (“Green and Co.’s

Confectionery Works”).

SC24 Thursday 25th February (“Brisbane Saturday Nights

- X”; subtitled “Around the Fountain” in the

Observer).

SC25 Tuesday 2nd March (“Down to Dunwich”).

SC26 Saturday 13th March (“At the Enoggera Cattle

Sales”).

SC27 Thursday 25th March (“The Police Patrol System”).

SC28 Wednesday 31st March (“Bona Fide Travellers”).

SC29 Thursday 8th April (“Bossing the Party”).

SC30 Saturday 17th April in the Courier; Tuesday 20th

April in the Observer (“St. Helena’s Sunny Side”).

SC31 Friday 23rd April, unsigned, in the Courier; Monday

26th April in the Observer (“The Brisbane Gaol”).

SC32 Tuesday 4th May (“The First Masque of the

Season”).

SC33 Wednesday 9th June (“The First Long-York Debate”).

SC34 Wednesday 30th June (“The Ipswich Woollen

Factory”).

SC35 Friday 30th July (“Revivalism in the Gaol” in the

Courier; “The Heathen At Our Door” in the Observer).

SC36 Friday 6th August (“The Mayor’s Ball - The Scene

From the Gallery”).

SC37 Friday 20th August (“The Crowd at the Exhibition”

- does not appear in the Courier).

SC38 Wednesday 25th August (“The Hotbed of American

Anarchy”).

SC39 Monday 8th November (“A Schoolteacher’s Picnic”).

SC40 Monday 22nd November (“The Children of the

State”).

SC41 Saturday 25th December (“Christmas Eve in

Brisbane”).

SC42 Friday 31st December (“A Fight to the Finish”).

1887

SC43 Wednesday 19th January (“More about Larrikinism”).

SC44 Wednesday 23rd February (“Sunday Night in Queen-

Street”).

SC45 Wednesday 30th March (“The YMCA Gala Night”).

SC46 Tuesday 3rd May (“To Rescue the Perishing”).

SC47 Thursday 26th May (“About Fish and Fishers”).

SC48 Tuesday 7th June (“The Rescuers at Work”).

SC49 Tuesday 14th June (“Two Lives for a Life”).

SC50 Wednesday 6th July (“An Evening with some Girls”).