The Letters of Rachel Henning, edited by David Adams, illustrated by Norman Lindsay

 

I bought this during my stay in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia in 1971. I wonder if the Penguin Australia logo (see top right hand corner) is still in use?

Rachel Henning was an Englishwoman, born in 1826, who in 1853 waved goodbye to her sister Annie and her brother Biddulph, who were emigrating to Australia. A year later Rachel and her sister Amy boarded ship to visit them.    

 

 Rachel writes long letters to her family about life on board ship (the journey took about two months)      and in Australia. At first Rachel finds little to approve of there, and she is homesick: 'I like this autumn weather, for it feels like England. .... An English letter makes me feel miserable for at least a day'.  After three years she returns to England (Amy stays in Australia).   However, she misses her brother very much and after two years once again boards a ship for the long journey to Sydney. Meanwhile Biddulph has moved to Queensland where he has established a sheep station (= farm). I quote from Norman Lindsay's introduction: 'From that moment, it seemed, Rachel shed the shell of her class-conscious spinsterhood and emerged to discover that life could be an exiting adventure, once freed from all its petty little restrictions. She took to pioneering with amazing gusto. (...) The thrill of opening up new prospects inspired her with a lyrical love for the beauties of Australian landscape,'

Travelling to Queensland takes a long time: first Rachel, Biddulph and Annie sail to Rockhampton. From there it takes them about two weeks, travelling on horseback,  to reach Exmoor station. Rachel enjoys everything about the trip: 'We had some very good damper (= bread), fresh beef, cheese and jam and I was never so hungry in my life, having had nothing since breakfast and ridden twenty miles. When it got dusk we all drew round the fire. (...) I never slept in my life as I did in that tent."

"Annie and I had to drive the nineteen horses, no sinecure among those ranges and gullies, where they kept bolting out of the road in search of feed and we had to gallop after them among rocks and roots and in all sorts of indesirable places. ' All this while riding side saddle!

Once in Exmoor, Annie is Biddulph's housekeeper, while Rachel keeps his books and accunts. She often goes for walks and rides, makes a garden and looks after pets and stray animals. While she roughs it in the bush, she is hardly ever without servants in her home. Although they live a fair distance from villages and towns, they have a lot of people working for them and there is a constant stream of visitors, so there is always something going on. During the wet season though, the station is often isolated, because the rivers swell and become impossible to pass. This means letters from England, anxiously awaited, take even longer to arrive.

'The shearing began yesterday, amd everybody is busy in the woolshed all day. Biddulph had hired six shearers; they can shear about seventy to one hundred sheep a day each, but as there are about 8000 to be got through, it is a long business. (...) Since the lambing season I have been quite overwhelmed with pet lambs; there is a flock of seven now lying on the veranda waiting for the next feeding time. '

'There is hardly anything pleasanter than a gallop over a plain with the wind rushing by you and the ground flying under your horses feet. '

'I never in my life saw so many strangers, and that, too, from all parts of the world - some fresh from England, some from Sydney, Adelaide, the Far North, and all parts of Australia. A Mr. Steward, who was lately here, had spent half his life in Madagascar; another had just come from India, another from California etc. etc. We have had quite a houseful lately.'

Rachel sees it as her duty to help Biddulph. 'I do not think I am likely to return to England unless Biddulph were to marry, much as I wish to see you all again; and fond as I am of home, I do greatly enjoy the lovely climate, good health and free outdoor life that we have here." But before her brother finds a wife,  Rachel gets married to Mr. Taylor.

'My Dearest Etta, This is not my usual fortnight for writing home, but I will not let another mail pass without giving you a piece of information which will, I fear, seriously disarrange your hair if you have not a very tight elastic to your net, and cause Mr. Boyce's hat to be lifted several inches above his head, if it is not a tolerably heavy one. It is neither more nor less than that I have been engaged for the last six months to Mr.Taylor, Biddulph's sheep overseer. (...) He has friends in the south, and hopes to get an overseership or managership somewhere down there."

Rachel travels south with het sister Annie (who is also getting married) on 'one of those dreadful steamers'. 'You will hardly believe how sorry I was to leave Exmoor. However, I could not draw back, for Annie rejoiced to go. So I took a farewell of my favourite walks in the scrub, put collars with conspicuous red streamers on the pet sheep and exhorted everyone on the station on the subject of their welfare, took an affectionate leave of my great kangaroo-dog and white cat, and about ten o'clock on the eight we left the dear old station where I certainly have spent three very happy years.' In 1866 she and Mr. Taylor marry and they go to live near Stroud in New South Wales, where Mr. Taylor manages a timber logging business.

 

 

'Things grow like magic here. Every stick that is stuck in seems to take root. I hope we shall have a nice garden in the spring.' Rachel enjoys married life and her new home very much, and I expected her and Mr. Taylor (as she refers to him in her letters) to stay in Stroud. But no: 'we shall both be very sorry to give it up; but we have both come to the conclusion that is too lonely a place to grow old in. We are nearly three miles from the nearest farm, eight from Stroud and almost three days' journey from Sydney.' And so they move again, to be near a railway station and near her brother and sisters.

Rachel was to live long enough to see the outbreak of the first world war, to ride in a motor-car and to see and aeroplane in flight. She died in 1914, at the age of 88.

I found Rachel's letters fascinating, very detailed and sometimes funny ('You must excuse me if my letter is a little unconnected, as the Irishman said of Johnson's dictionary") but I wish the editor would have provided more background information on life in Australia in the 19th century, particularly on what life was like for aborigines, who Rachel seems to regard as silly children who cannot be trusted.

Rachel's letters can be found at Project Gutenberg

 Interesting background information, including criticism of David Adams' editing can be found on the   Australian Women Writers Website

 

The Farm in the Green Mountains by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer (1987)

 

 

In the 1930's Alice and Carl Zuckmayer ('Zuck') and their two daughters are forced to flee Germany. After living in Austria and Switzerland they end up in the USA where they then spend five years living in Backwoods Farm, near Barnard in Vermont. Alice wrote letters to her family, and these letters became this memoir, which was published in German in 1949.

 

 

 

After arriving in the US the Zuckmayers live in in Los Angeles and New York, but during the summers they spend time in rented properties in Barnard, Vermont, slowly getting used to a relatively simple life. After three summers they decide to move there permanently. As Elisa Albert writes in her introduction: 'These were urbane sophisticates, mind you. These were celebrated artistic intellectuals with connections, good clothes. (..) These were not people who knew from farming. They had no clue if or when they might ever return home. The very idea of 'home' had become impossibly muddled, if not permanently eradicated. They were emigrants. They were immigrants. They had no choice. They had to find themselves a new home, and they had to get to work. They chose  the farm in Vermont. They got to work.'

They decide to rent Backwoods Farm and it seems this is where they find their new home.  They learn by necessity. They learn by doing, with help from the many brochures published by the US Department of Agriculture that they order. Again I quote from the excellent introduction: 'Farm life turns out to be a never-ending cascade of chores. Backbreaking, spirit-bending labor. But 'making the best of a difficult situation' is what New-Englanders do, apparently and Alice fits right in.'

They decide to keep chickens and have chicken houses built. Later they add geese, ducks, pigs and goats. Goats, 'with an unquenchable taste for roses, shoes, green apples, lawn chairs, pieces of laundry, and cigarette butts',  are not easy animals to look after: 'they became the object of our hearfelt love and the reason for our wildest outbreaks of rage. They were fun and trouble, joy and vexation. They subjected our feeling to rapid swings between a desire to murder them and a wish to hug them tenderly.'

For three years the farm is infested with rats. They try everything to get rid of them, with poison as a last resort. 'Two years after their arrival they suddenly disappeared. Whether it was that we had really fooled them a few times, and a few of their elders had themselves gotten poisoned corn, ot whether it was that we had put up too many fences even an eel couldn't wriggle through, or whether it was simply that they were seized with wanderlust and went in search of a better farm, we never knew.'

 

Alice clearly enjoys life in the country, with friendly neighbours, a local newspaper that tells you who has been staying where and why, and deliveries to your mailbox. 'Only after we returned to Europe did it occur to me how unusual it was that nothing was stolen from these widely separated mailboxes standing by the open highway. At our mailbox treasures such as whiskey, tobacco, meat, coffee, etc., were often deposited by the letter carier, and in all the years we were there we always found everything just as it had been left.'

As I mentioned, the book is made up of Alice's letters home and of course the people she wrote to would have known things the reader does not. I would have liked some more explanation here and there. For instance, I kept wondering: what did these people live on? Setting up the farm and buying the animals must have cost a lot of money, as would sending their daughters to boarding schools. Alice mentions selling eggs etc. but I doubt they could live on that.  Perhaps they lived on Zuck's earnings as a writer? Being a librarian I loved her chapters on (or 'ode to') the Dartmouth Library but I wish she would have told us more about her research. Why was she researching the early Middle Ages? And so on... I also would have loved a map.

The Zuckmayers have a daughter called Winnetou ... Now, I don't know if he is well known in English speaking countries, but generations in the Netherlands grew up with the books of Karl May, a German author who wrote a seemingly endless stream of adventure stories. The two protagonists of his books set in the American West are called Old Shatterhand and Winnetou. I read Carl was a big Karl May fan and so he named his daughter Winnetou. I couldn't help feeling sorry for the girl. I notice that in later life she went by " Maria".

At first I had trouble getting to grips with this book, as parts of it are not written in paragraphs but in a series of sentences/statements, which I found odd and had to get used to. Have a look at a page to see what I mean: 

Because of the fact that no information is added to the letters I constantly had the feeling that I was reading snippets of a story that I just would not get to know completely, but in spite of that I found it an enjoyable read.