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  Big Bill was pleased when I told him I’d heard from my ma. He asked me if I’d like to come with him on the weekend to a place called Kanangra Walls. I couldn’t say yes quick enough. Weekends were the worst for me, as I had little to do if I wasn’t working.

  Bill lived with his missus just the other side of Lithgow. On weekends he did a lot of walking and climbing, which she couldn’t do on account of she was expecting. Early on the Saturday morning I met Bill at the Lithgow railway station and as paying customers (my first time) took a train to a little village called Hartley. Here Bill found an open coach which took sightseers to Jenolan Caves. After travelling several miles through undulating sheep and cow pastures, the coach made its way through thick scrub and emerged near the edge of a cliff.

  ‘You’ll need to prepare yourself for what’s up ahead,’ said Bill as the road became deeply rutted and strewn with loose rocks and boulders. ‘This old road was hacked out of the sandstone by convicts in chains only sixty years ago. The redcoats whipped them without mercy. Look, you can still see the crushed convict bones used in making the road.’ He pointed to numerous white pebbles scattered through the red dirt (I later learned these were quartz). ‘The convicts dropped dead from exhaustion. Many of ’em took their freedom by stepping off the edge of the road and falling to their death way below.’ I could see Bill watching the look on my face.

  The road narrowed till I could have sworn it was less than the width of the dray in which we were perched. I was seated on the far left-hand side and found myself looking straight down a sheer precipice. At times the wheel below me passed within several inches of the road’s edge. I figured I would have no chance if the edge crumbled. I braced myself to climb over Bill’s head to safety, if need be. And yet the driver seemed to consider there was little point in going cautiously to his death. He had those horses trotting along at a fair pace, clearly trusting to their sense of self-preservation. Until then I’d considered myself pretty daring for hanging off the back of the steam tram that went down Broadway to Central Station. Jenolan Caves may have been only a day or so from Glebe, but for me it was as good as a lifetime.

  After alighting alive from the coach I was very happy to follow Bill on foot along a path through the bush. I’d agreed to help carry some of Bill’s equipment, which turned out to be quite heavy. Bill bought, sold and repaired used cameras as another string to his bow. We had two cameras with us and a solid wooden tripod almost as tall as me. We carried woollen blankets rolled up like a swagman’s and a billy with tea and sugar along with salted meat and potatoes for an evening meal.

  Bill impressed me with his ease in the bush. But what captivated me most of all was a small camera called a box brownie which Bill let me hold. I had never in my life held a camera before. That Saturday afternoon standing on the top of Kanangra Walls a thousand feet above the valley below, I held Bill’s box brownie camera to my chest and, looking down into its small peephole, I saw in the aperture a mirror image of the broadest and most spectacular valley I had ever looked upon. To the east was a series of ridges on which the sun was now retreating. The most prominent ridge, Bill said, was Katoomba, some thirty miles away. Between this ridge and our vertical cliff wall we looked out on a canopy of gum trees. The bush below was completely still and silent, but Bill told me it was full of wildlife: wallabies, goannas, echidnas and, if you knew how to find them, koalas and platypus.

  Once the sun dropped I shivered in an icy wind.

  ‘That cold air is coming straight off the Snowy Mountains in the far south-west,’ said Bill. I looked in the direction he was pointing, hoping for a glimpse of snow-capped mountains, which I’d only ever seen in storybooks. But I couldn’t see anything, so I knew the mountains he was talking about must be a long way away. Despite the cold in Lithgow, the only thing I’d seen approaching snow was a heavy frost around my lodgings.

  ‘I’d like to see those Snowy Mountains one day, Bill,’ I said.

  ‘Well if you go by steam train and coach it will take you almost a week to get there. I’ve never been, and being a father soon I’m not likely to either.’

  ‘Ah well, maybe there is no snow,’ I said. ‘Like the Blue Mountains aren’t blue. Might just be a lot of talk.’

  ‘Oh, they get snow alright . . .’ Bill said as he started heading back along the track, with me hard on his heels, ‘some winters it snows here in the Blue Mountains, so I reckon the peaks in the Snowies really cop it then.’

  ‘Tell you what, Bill, I’m saving my wages. I’ll buy my own box brownie and get a picture of some snow for you.’

  We dropped down below the ridge. I followed Bill along a series of rock overhangs. We came to a cave that was dry and had the look of being lived in. The sandstone ceiling was blackened by cooking fires. Bill dropped his pack and asked me to gather wood. I was none too happy about our campsite. I was scared of snakes. Only half a mile from my home in Glebe there were plenty of blacks and browns along Blackwattle Creek. Bill laughed and told me what I already knew, that they’d be hibernating. Just in case, I brought plenty of wood to keep the fire going all night.

  Bill made tea in the billy and cooked up a meal which was plain but welcome. ‘Hunger makes the best sauce,’ said Bill. As we ate, he told me stories of his travels.

  ‘My father was with the railways. We was always on the move. Every year or so we’d pack up the trunk and move to another railway town. Then my brother and I worked as jackeroos. We were droving as far north as those Queensland rivers will let you. Now my brother’s heading off to Africa to fight the Boers. Taking his horse with him. But I can’t go, can I, being married and all. But just imagine the photographs I could take in Africa.’ I could hear the regret in his voice.

  I didn’t say anything to Bill, but I did start to think that maybe one day I too could travel to faraway places, not just spend my life in Lithgow or Sydney.

  That night we camped rough, wrapped in blankets on the dirt, I slept better than I had for a long time.

  The following weekend Bill invited me home to watch him develop his pictures in a shed he called his darkroom.

  ‘Pictures can be on glass plates with chemicals or on rolls of photographic paper,’ he explained. I stood back as he swirled the film in solution in an old laundry tub under the dim light cast by a red lamp. ‘The picture is already stored on the paper. You’re looking at a chemical reaction.’ Then out of the blackness I saw an image take shape, an image of myself, a small figure in a landscape of towering cliffs and dark shadowy trees. I had been captured. It all seems so matter of fact today but at that time I thought Bill must have some kind of magical powers. I felt I had been initiated into one of the secrets of the universe and of mankind and our memories of things past. I was as impressionable as the photographic paper.

  I determined I would buy a camera. If Bill could master this magic, then I could too. I could see it was a portal to many things and was excited by the idea I could go off travelling to all sorts of places and at the same time create a record of my exploits to show Ma. It was a fad for many but for me I could not learn enough about the mystery of photography. In truth I had no idea where this might lead. But I could see immediately it was more exciting than all the modern machinery at Sandford’s.

  Cameras became an obsession for me. I learned all I could from Bill. I bought my own camera and improvised a darkroom at my lodgings. The camera became my companion on numerous day-long excursions. Bill increasingly had other things to keep him busy, so I was usually by myself. I found I preferred the freedom of setting my own pace and finding the exact spots I wanted, at the time of day I wanted. My homesickness was overtaken by a love of photography, of discovering an image that filled the lens and capturing it perfectly, without any loss of sharpness. I would then develop that picture in the darkroom and transform it into my composition. I was still alone, but with my camera it didn’t seem so bad.

  My letters home became more civil. I apologised to Pa. He had no broken bones and was all mend
ed. He wrote saying he forgave me and that he was proud to hear I was doing so well at Sandford’s.

  It was a full eighteen months before I was reunited with Ma and Pa. Sandford’s won a contract to repair the engines of a cargo ship in Sydney. They sent an engineer and a work party, including myself, to stay on board the ship in the Sydney docks while the work was carried out. I was but a mile from home. After a day or so, and without any prior warning, I knocked on the front door. There were hugs and tears from Ma, until I had to pull away. I didn’t ask to stay and that night I returned to my berth on board ship.

  At the shipyard I discovered yet another world, quite unlike Sandford’s. I worked alongside the ship’s engineers and boiler room men. They were a different breed. If they had families, they rarely saw them, but their stories of exotic ports raised my wanderlust to another level.

  I would not return to Lithgow. At the end of our ship repair contract I gave notice to Sandford’s and signed on with the shipping company, which was anxious to get the vessel back on its routes of trade. That evening I went home to Glebe and announced I was going to sea. I hadn’t expected the furore this unleashed. In hindsight I should have slipped away quietly. I wasn’t good at anticipating these things.

  ‘Jamie, you ’ave no idea the dreadful lives these sailors lead!’ My mother’s voice still had the faint accent from her French parents, who had been vignerons in the Hunter Valley. ‘The sinful places they frequent, the diseases they ’ave. You have never been good at understanding people. They cannot read or write. Would you want to be like them? At least finish a trade. The ship’s officers have certificates. You could be a marine engineer and not just riffraff.’

  ‘But it’s a chance to travel. Why should I stay home? There’s nothing for me here!’

  ‘Am I nothing? Jamie, you should be ashamed. You don’t even have normal feelings for your own mother!’

  My father’s contribution took my legs away. ‘Jamie, whilst you’re on board that ship, it won’t be leaving port.’ He was a Trades Hall bigwig now and I knew it was no idle threat.

  Pa was as good as his word. The ship sailed without me. Instead I found myself unemployed and living back in our already strained household in Glebe.

  I took solace in Sydney’s photographic shops, studios and photoengravers. Here I discovered opportunities to learn which Lithgow had been unable to provide. I spent hours at Harrington’s camera shop in George Street, and became friends with Henri Mallard, a camera salesman who worked there. He organised a job for me behind the counter. It didn’t last; I wasn’t born to serve people like that. I left before I was asked to leave. But Henri and I stayed in touch through our interest in photography. On weekends we journeyed by train to the coastal fringes of the city and explored the dramatic sea cliffs and rock platforms.

  On a scorching-hot New Year’s Day, 1901, Henri made me don a borrowed suit and dragged me with our cameras on a packed tram out to Centennial Park. Huge crowds were gathered and brass bands played popular songs in the shade of newly erected pavilions. Though they were of little interest to me, there were dignitaries whom Henri wanted to photograph. Queen Victoria had appointed a new governor-general, Lord Hopetoun, who had come out from England to represent not just New South Wales but all the colonial states. His job that day was to declare the Commonwealth of Australia as the newest country in the British Empire and swear in Australia’s first-ever prime minister. When I asked Henri what that meant he replied, ‘More taxation and more politicians.’ Despite our suits and impressive cameras, Henri and I were turned away from the rotunda where the formalities were to take place, and had to be content with panorama shots of the crowd.

  Meanwhile, things were a bit fiery at home. Pa arranged interviews for me to obtain an apprenticeship as an electrical fitter and instrument maker with the Telegraph Department. I was fascinated by the practical science of the department’s work, but it didn’t hold my interest the way photography did. I often disappeared at lunchtime or after work to visit Harrington’s. As a result I may have taken my day job too lightly and been too cocky for a young apprentice. One morning I was called into a meeting and, to my shock, was told my lack of dedication was unacceptable and my services no longer required. Harder still was the unhappy argument which followed with my father. ‘A jack of all trades,’ he said. ‘That’s all you’ll ever be!’

  But a jack of all trades can be well placed to seize an opportunity. At that time every shop in Sydney was selling photographic postcards. I could see that the photographs I was taking were the very type that sold best: crashing waves, spectacular sunsets, sailing ships and dramatic headlands. Before long I found lucrative employment with another former Harrington’s colleague, Henry Cave, producing postcards which sold like hot cakes out of his workshop not far from Circular Quay. I didn’t need to deal with customers. During the day I captured images to outsell all others and in the evening I worked on the negatives. We produced and printed thousands of cards for sale.

  I had the knack and the daring to get the shots that others couldn’t. There was no such thing as a telephoto lens; you had to get the camera close to the action. I ruined a good many cameras trying to capture waves crashing at the Gap, but I managed to save some of the best shots. And with my tripod on the railway tracks at Brooklyn I held my nerve as speeding steam trains hurtled around the sandstone cuttings. I then had to take off in great haste before I was beaten up by irate train drivers. My little brother Eddie often came with me and helped me run with all the camera gear.

  Learning from others, I became a wizard in the darkroom. Taking the photograph was only half the job. What a shot lacked could easily be added. I imbued a sense of drama by turning to good use the negatives of pictures I had taken of sunrises, sunsets, black storm clouds, southerly busters building up over Sydney and massive banks of white cumulus clouds. By composite printing I could add these to any subject, sometimes combining several negatives to get everything needed for the perfect picture. Cumulus clouds were my favourite. There were very few landscape pictures that could not be enlivened by the addition of cumulus clouds. They were a natural adornment to a landscape panorama.

  One of my favourite subjects was the South Head lighthouse. My experimental night-time shots did not do justice to its powerful electric rotating beam. Eventually I camped for the night with my camera in a fixed position and obtained multiple exposures of the light shining in all directions. Using composite printing, I was able to create a photograph showing the lighthouse beaming to all points of the compass. This postcard sold over twenty thousand copies.

  There was a gleam in my father’s eyes now that I found myself at the cutting edge in the printing trade. He knew all the major publishers and we talked excitedly about business and people he knew who could help. Every week there was a new illustrated magazine on the newsstands craving spectacular front-page photographs—the kind of photographs I could supply.

  I was working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, and making a name for myself with articles in photographic journals, so Henry Cave really couldn’t say no to making me a partner when I asked, but he insisted on charging five hundred quid to buy in. That put a stopper on me. I was nineteen with no savings, and the banks were not as excited as I was. That’s when Pa made his proposal. It wasn’t my idea. He sold up the lease on the family home without telling me. Said he was thinking of doing it anyway. The family no longer needed all that space, he said. We left our house in Derwent Street and moved to a smaller place in Lodge Street. Pa came up with the money and that was the start of Cave & Hurley, which did well for several years.

  That was how I first learned that Pa had not been a union leader all his life. Often after he’d knocked off from work he would come in of an evening and help me with sorting out orders and updating the bookwork. One night over a whisky he told me that before he was married and tied down with family he had been an entrepreneur with a small printing business in the Hunter Valley. He’d been successful and hired more a
nd more staff. Then one day his bookkeeper didn’t show up for work, just disappeared, the financial records and journals gone with him.

  ‘He stole from you?’

  ‘He blew it all on the gee gees and cards. I had no idea. You just can’t trust people Jamie.’

  ‘You had to start again?’

  ‘Start again?’ He studied the glass in his hand. ‘In country towns you can’t just start again. There was barely enough cash to pay wages. I could have kept going—I didn’t need much to live on—but it was the debt, Jamie. Debt is an insidious bastard. It had crept up on me. Well one day the bank stopped my cheques. You should have seen the looks I got in town when that happened. Then my suppliers wouldn’t give me stock unless I paid ’em cash. My business came to a grinding halt. I was lucky to leave town with the shirt on my back. I arrived in Sydney penniless and was damned lucky to get a job at the Government Printers. Before long my workmates elected me as their rep and then a delegate to Trades Hall.’

  ‘Did you ever want to do something different?’

  ‘Oh, by then I’d met your ma; fell for her accent, I did. Her folks were French vignerons who had nothing more than dirt and vines and their daughter. Next thing you know we are married and she is expecting your oldest brother. I never had another chance to make money. But Jamie, play your cards right and this is your chance to rise up.’

  In the postcard trade at that time business opportunities seemed to just keep coming. I hardly had time to scratch myself. But there was a lot of competition out there and you had to be quick to see where the market was heading. Henry Cave was often reluctant to branch out in new directions. He had a young family and was coming in late and going home early. We argued, and eventually things between us were so tense we couldn’t stand being in the shop together. Pa thought we’d manage better ourselves and decided to buy Henry out.

  ‘Get rid of him,’ he said. ‘He’s taking the money and credit for your photographs.’