Yet on any to-morrow, positions between those living in St. Kilda the smart, and St. Kilda “Canvass Town,” might be reversed. Here Cradock was born in June, 1856, and died in November of the following year.
By the time of the birth (November 15th, 1858) of Harold Beauchamp (who was to become the “Pa Man,” father of Katherine Mansfield), Arthur was prospecting, again — this time at Ararat, in the Victoria Pyrenees. Ararat was one of the forested spurs descending from the broken range at the foot of higher ridges. The ground was scarred as though the city of tents and rough huts had been under fire, leaving holes in the earth like gaping graves.
Luck went tremendously for or against the prospectors here. Some, like Arthur Beauchamp, with luck dead against them, changed and changed again, slaving away the whole of daylight — uselessly — when those at a short distance were discovering rich treasure. The formation was like that in the other mining districts of Victoria: beneath the surface soil lay a thick bed of gravel; then a bed of reddish earth containing gold; but not much time was spent on this, as immediately below lay a bed of blue clay likely to contain ore; below the clay was a stratum of slate with rich pockets (fissures in the slate in which gold had been deposited — sometimes in solid nuggets). But on certain claims masses of granite hidden in the clay beds blocked progress for days. To be comparatively, or intermittently, lucky was not enough. It was considered nothing to find an average of two ounces of gold a day. Diggers were seldom content with less than £60 to £70 a week; some made as much as £500 to £1,000.
But the luck of gold which passed over the father descended upon the son. It was to avoid his brothers, but settle on him. Born in a city of a day, he was to have many homes, enlarging and increasing as time passed. He was to have granted, finally, his deepest wish — prestige, but it was to come to him vicariously, and in the manner he expected least.
By this time, 1858, two more Beauchamp brothers had reached Australia — Frederick, who died almost immediately after arriving in Sydney, and Horatio, who started a business which flourished and descended to his grandsons. Henry Herron remained at Sydney until 1870 (“Elizabeth” was born in Kribilli); then he returned to England. But Arthur, who had no divining rod in this country, returned again to St. Kilda, and in Melbourne he began what was to be his life-occupation: combined auctioneering and a general store.
With his dramatic ability, and his tenacious memory, he was a born auctioneer. It was his custom to attract attention by preliminary recitations, and when he had assembled a crowd, to approach the subject of his wares by the road of witticism and pun, until he had warmed his audience before the sale, as some of his trade-rivals warmed it after by “shouting” drinks. Contemporaries remember his reciting Byron for a solid hour and a half. There was no end to the verses he had by heart, or to his ingenuity in adapting them to his use, or to his endurance in declaiming them.
He was well liked, being a magnetic, genial little man with keen blue eyes, and a gruff rounded voice that carried. When his goods were not in demand for themselves, he startled his audience into buying. Auctioneering — and shop-keeping, too — were nearly as precarious as prospecting, for on the goldfields the ordinary laws of supply and demand simply did not exist,”the value of the thing being what it will fetch.” To speculate successfully in stores required unusual foresight and quickness, for the market was in a bewildering state of fluctuation. This game was better adapted to the talents of Arthur Beauchamp than prospector’s “luck.”
Dealing generally with men who had easy gold in their hands, the store-man could do a tremendous business, if he had the wit to popularise some special article and get a “corner on it.” For a time, the height of fashion for Melbourne brides was a lorgnette; and “spy-glasses,” as they were called, sold for an exorbitant price until the demand exhausted the supply. Again, a rat plague raised the price of cats to 30s.; and boots sold for several guineas a pair, until a storekeeper imported a whole ship-load from England when the price dropped suddenly to 7s.
Stores were usually paid for over the counter with gold, a nugget greater in value than the goods, being “changed” into fine gold. The salesman, if he was canny, allowed his customers 55s. an ounce, and exchanged the gold at the Melbourne bank for 65.
Yet there were times when the auctioneering business was so crowded that turnover came only by “cutting trade” (selling at cost, or below); moreover, there was always danger from bushrangers; and purchased goods were not always paid for. Rarer and rarer became the trustful store-keeper who would “keep a bunch of mates going” till they “struck it.” If a man was lucky, he usually paid, but if ill-luck dogged him, it cast its shadow on the store-keeper. It took a fearless and resourceful man to collect his debts.
The Beauchamps’ fourth son, Arthur de Charmes, was born in St. Kilda in September, 1860. In the harbour was a fleet of anchored ships, whose crews had all deserted for the “diggings”; yet housing was insufficient for those left, and the city and suburbs were fearfully overcrowded; and “no man having even the appearance of respectability,” a contemporary wrote “can go abroad in the unlighted, unswept and filthy streets without the danger of being ‘bailed up’ by marauders.”
In 1861, announcing that “the climate of Melbourne was fatal to his very young children,” Arthur Beauchamp with his family, his brother Cradock, his fellow-prospector and friend, Mr. Hornby, and all their goods and chattels, embarked for Picton, New Zealand, on the brig Lalla Rookh, and left Australia for ever.
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Heralded by the Marlborough Press when he reached the Sounds, he already had sufficient merchandise to start a store, which Mr. Hornby had built for him on Wellington Street, near the quay. A “General Merchant” he called himself — a grocer, really, and an auctioneer.
Again, as at the goldfields, he chose a place which almost made his fortune. Picton, on the shores of a sheltered and beautiful harbour like a quiet lake, was tucked into the valley surrounded by protective hills climbing to the south, making a barrier pierced only by the high and narrow pass to the Wairau Plains. From these hills, two jagged promontories inclined northward into the sea, forming the Queen Charlotte Sounds. Picton, facing north, enclosed by those steep and heavily bush-clad mountains, had one of the most easily defensible harbours in New Zealand. That, and its central position, nearly made it the seat of government.
In 1860, gold was discovered to the southward, at Wakamarina. When the rush came, four years later, the population doubled and the town had a tremendous boom; but though this was one of the richest fields ever discovered in New Zealand, prospectors were soon lured to the west coast. Wakamarina was “poor man’s diggings” — most of the gold being picked up out of crevices.
Coal was discovered by prospecting diggers during the Wakamarina rush, but the deposit was so rich that they believed it had been left by a passing steamer, and nothing was done about it until its rediscovery, some years later. Then the Picton Coal Company was formed, but the mining was found too expensive, and it was abandoned. Yet no harbour in New Zealand was so well adapted for a coal port.
Neither Government, nor gold, nor coal brought wealth to Picton, nor to Arthur Beauchamp. As it was, he found wealth of a different sort. Something held him for ever to New Zealand, bound him especially to the Marlborough Sounds, rover though he might be. It was said of him that he moved so often, his poultry went to sleep on their backs with their feet up, ready to be tied; yet he spent more than thirty years of his rover’s life on these Sounds. It was his one constancy.
In his early years at Picton, he threw himself vigorously into the struggle that was then waging for the life of the town. Picton, despite its early settlement, had no real importance until 1861, when it became the seat of the Provincial Government. The rich Wairau and Awatere valleys to the
