Rock Cakes

Nan (q.v.) took her special recipe for rock cakes to her grave, or, to be more accurate, the Springvale crematorium. However, reconstructing the general approach from memory, it must have gone something like this:

Heat your oven to 340 degrees Fahrenheit. Rub 4 oz of butter into 8 oz of self-raising flour with the tips of your fingers until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.

Add 4 oz of sugar, ½ cup of sultanas, ¼ teaspoon of salt, ½ teaspoon of cinnamon, ¼ teaspoon of nutmeg, and maybe some other spices, to taste, allspice perhaps?, and mix them in thoroughly.

Make a little hollow in the middle, and add 1 egg, lightly beaten, and 3 tablespoons of milk. Gently mix all this into a good dough.

Place heaped dessert-spoonfuls of this promising concoction in lumps on a greased baking sheet, allowing some room for spreading, then bake for 10 minutes, or until the rock cakes are very lightly browned.

Allow to cool, make a pot of tea, then devour.

Now, something tells me that there was a certain astringency, a nip in the aftertaste, that suggests that Nan may have used baking soda, but I cannot be sure.

As well, this illustration is all wrong, because Nan never permitted her rock cakes to assume more than the slightest hint of brownness. Her rock cakes, in other words, were essentially blond, and smoother in texture, so the dough was therefore probably a few notches higher on the sloppiness scale.

Although the basic features are certainly correct, this recipe has Tasmanian provenance, and is therefore not entirely reliable.

Nan

Iona Heather Trumble, my paternal grandmother, was the daughter of Alexander Campbell, a director of the Broken Hill Proprietary Block 14 Company, Ltd., whose head office was at 31 Queen Street, Melbourne.

Great-grandfather Campbell was a mining engineer, and migrated from Scotland some time in the 1870s or 1880s.

The division of B.H.P. which he, Clive Baillieu, and others created was incorporated in the colony of Victoria on February 19, 1887, with capital of £155,000 in 100,000 10% “cum.” preferred 6s. shares, and 100,000 ordinary 25s. shares.

The company owned property at Broken Hill in New South Wales (obviously), but it developed an interest in the King Island Scheelite Company in Bass Strait (est. 1915), of which Great-Grandfather Campbell was chairman from 1917.

The Campbell family lived in Brighton, and spent their weekends and holidays at Portsea. Campbell’s Road was named after my great-grandfather, who, I seem to recall, first surveyed it. Owing to the Scheelite venture, the Campbells regularly sailed from Portsea or Sorrento to King Island aboard the two-masted wooden screw steamer S.S. Wauchope, occasionally bringing with them Nan’s pony.

Nan and her father were on board the Wauchope on August 1, 1919, when she was anchored at Portsea for a compulsory quarantine stop of seven days. It is hard to know what bio-hazard was thought to emanate from Portsea that might endanger King Island, but presumably the authorities knew what they were doing.

The ship was carrying a cargo of 250 tons, including flour, sugar, maize, machinery, a motor car, drapery, gasoline, oil, and, unfortunately, twenty-eight cylinders of acetylene gas for the lighthouses on King Island.

Five crew and seventeen other passengers were also on board. At 7 o’clock that evening a fire broke out in the hold of the ship.

The passengers were straight away ordered to pack their belongings, and board the two lifeboats. Despite their best efforts to bring the fire under control, naturally the cylinders of acetylene gas produced a large explosion, and the captain and crew were forced to abandon ship at 11.oo o’clock. The burned out hulk was later scuttled in Port Phillip Bay.

Over the years the family developed a close friendship with an old local on King Island, an unmarried Scot, who knew the ropes, and was ever after affectionately known as Uncle Jock. The friendship lasted, and eventually Nan and Pa looked after Uncle Jock in his old age and, when he died, arranged for him to be buried in a plot they purchased for him at Springvale.

At least they thought they purchased it.

Some years ago, Uncle Alec received a telephone call from a cheerful young person at Springvale, who informed him that Uncle Jock’s tenancy had effectively “expired.” In the absence of any next of kin, was there anything in particular that Uncle Alec wanted to do with him now?

The options seemed to be either to pay a substantial fee for another expensive but finite period of repose, and thereby lob this problem on to the next generation of Trumbles twenty-five years hence; effectively to authorize Springvale to deposit Uncle Jock in an unmarked mass grave, or to seek alternative accommodation.

After some consideration, Uncle Alec rang the local authorities on King Island, inquiring whether a spot could be found for Uncle Jock in the local cemetery. He explained that as an early resident of the island in theory Uncle Jock’s claim for a plot was as good as anyone’s.

He need not have worried. Uncle Jock, they said, would be more than welcome, in return for a fee so modest that Uncle Alec felt it necessary to ask a tactfully phrased follow-up question as to how long Uncle Jock’s next period of interment might reasonably be expected to last. The answer was unambiguous, in that refreshingly characteristic Tasmanian way:

“Oh, forever,” said the man at the King Island cemetery.

Nan’s father, Alexander Campbell, a doughty Scots Presbyterian, married Jane Heather, the daughter of George Frew, a Catholic grazier, who owned property at Tabor in the western district of Victoria, not far from the southern end of the Grampians.

The bizarre solution to the sectarian problem posed by this mixed marriage was to split the difference, and to agree that my grandmother and her siblings would be raised “Church of England.”

As a young woman Nan was a keen sportswoman, and a champion golfer.

Here she is in London in 1949, where my grandfather T. C. Trumble (Pa), was one of the instructing solicitors to Garfield Barwick, Q.C. (a future Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia) in the famous case of Commonwealth of Australia v. The Bank of New South Wales, which was decided on appeal by their lordships of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

Nan and Pa sailed to England with the Barwicks aboard the Stratheden in 1948, and took up residence at Claridge’s for eighteen months, while the case was prepared, argued, heard, and ultimately decided in the banks’ favor, in effect overruling the High Court of Australia, and overturning the Chifley government’s Banks Act of 1947.

The case was complex, and partly hinged on the constitutional issue of free trade between the states. Pa’s client was actually the government of the state of Victoria, whose interest in the matter arose from the serious implications of the proposed nationalization of the Australian banks for the cultivation in and around Mildura of raisins.

Rarely, if ever, has dried fruit assumed such constitutional importance, and the case stands as a tribute to the ingenuity, not to say brilliance, of my grandfather’s legal reasoning.

Pa went to school at Brighton Grammar, fought in World War I in the Royal Naval Air Service, and single-handedly disabled a German U-boat from the cockpit of his Sopwith Camel biplane, an achievement that was mentioned in despatches.

He became senior partner of Malleson, Stewart, and Co., as it was then known, and sat on the boards of several public companies. He was a churchwarden at St. George’s Church of England, Malvern.

Nan baked exceptionally good rock cakes, and liked to smoke Benson and Hedges’ cigarettes.

Robbo

Ian Gordon Robertson, 1935–2004, scholar, teacher, mentor, friend.

I first met Ian in 1981, after a lecture at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and became his student in 1983. In Rome, he introduced me to Contessa Luciana Valentini, who was at that time the librarian of the British School at Rome, and smoothed an easy path towards obtaining my tessera for the Vatican Library, at that time no easy feat.

His comments on essays extended sometimes to many paragraphs, in his flawlessly elegant hand, and while, at times, astringent, and occasionally cross, you always felt that he paid you the compliment of taking your work as seriously as it deserved to be.

Ian presided over riotous end-of-year parties for his students, and liked over lunch to set out his unique personal philosophy, which he described as “Catholic agnosticism.”

He was proud of his French heritage, his acquaintanceship with the “contessa madre,” and towards the end of his life was an inveterate maker of late-night telephone calls.

Requiescat in pace.

The following is an excellent obituary by Charles Zika and Ian Britain, “Vale Ian Robertson,” UniNews, Vol. 13, No. 2, February 23-March 8, 2004, augmented with material printed in the order of service for Ian’s requiem mass, which took place in the chapel of Newman College, University of Melbourne, January 13, 2004:

Ian Robertson taught generations of history students at the University of Melbourne and, on the wider international scene, was known as a scholar of Renaissance Rome.

He was born in Brighton (Melbourne), educated at Wesley College (a prize pupil of the celebrated critic and English master A. A. Phillips) and graduated with first class honors in History at the University of Melbourne.

In 1958 a scholarship took him aboard the Strathnaver to Magdalen College, Oxford, where under the mentorship of distinguished historian John Hale he took out a B.Phil. – often regarded in those days as superior to a doctorate.

Ian commenced the first of his sustained stints in Italy as a “British Scholar at Rome” in 1959. He recalled being guided around the city in his early days by Sir Anthony Blunt, the famous scholar, connoisseur, and spy for the Russians.

Appointed in 1961 to a lectureship in his old department, Ian returned to Melbourne, which was his institutional base for the rest of his life.

He was promoted to a senior lectureship in 1966, and from 1982 to 1984 served as chairman of the department, ever judicious and consultative in the public controversies which embroiled the department at that time.

Periods of study leave drew him back to Rome, particularly to the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana where much of his research was conducted.

From 1973 to 1975 he was Assistant Director of the British School at Rome.

His work on the administration of the papacy and the papal states in the fifteenth century culminated in his book on Pope Paul II and Bologna, Tyranny under the Mantle of St. Peter, which, though much delayed, was eventually published in 2002.

It was as a teacher that Ian acquired his widest reputation and exercised his greatest influence. His lectures were legendary for their clarity, depth, and sweep. His tutorials could be intimidating, but if you stayed the course they proved deeply inspiring.

Ian was instrumental in establishing a vibrant culture of research, especially among those he guided toward postgraduate studies. It was in large part his energies, generosity, passion, and judgment, that paved the way for the field of Italian Renaissance studies becoming one of the most renowned areas of research by Australians in the international arena.

Ian took early retirement at the end of 1997, disillusioned by the impact on universities of the Dawkins reforms. He continued as a fellow of the department, a generous yet exacting supervisor, mentor, and friend to many.

As well as the Italian language, Ian mastered the skills of the cucina, and loved to entertain his friends in Melbourne and Rome.

He had no surviving family members in Australia, but was surrounded by friends and former colleagues during his last illness in St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he died on Tuesday, January 6, 2004, the Feast of the Epiphany.

Jean Waller

Jean Mary Waller, 1914–1999, librarian, teacher, mentor, and friend.

Jean was born on March 15, 1914. Despite having in infancy suffered from septic arthritis of the hip joint, which caused her to grow up with a degree of permanent lameness, Jean lived a remarkably active life in the course of which she overcame many obstacles – mainly physical, but not exclusively.

Jean trained in librarianship in Sydney, and got her first job in the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne.

In 1953 she went from there to be deputy librarian, then chief librarian of what was then the University of Malaya. From 1960 to 1966, Jean was University Librarian of the University of the newly independent Republic of Singapore.

In 1967 Jean returned to Australia to take up the position of deputy librarian at the Australian National University in Canberra. She wrote a Guide to the Libraries, the Australian National University (Institute of Advanced Studies), Canberra: Australian National University Library, 1970, and, with Enid Bishop, edited International Co-operation in Orientalist Librarianship: Papers Presented at the Library Seminars, 28th International Congress of Orientalists, Canberra, 6–12 January 1971, Canberra : National Library of Australia (for the Library Seminars Planning Committee), 1972.

In semi-retirement, Jean succeeded the redoubtable Miss Mary Rusden (reg. 1966–78) as Leeper Librarian (1978–82), then, in a voluntary capacity, as Mollison (i.e. diocesan) Librarian (1982–94) at Trinity College in the University of Melbourne, where – as she always did wherever she went – she attracted a posse of new and admiring friends.

One of the most enlightened but hitherto unsung administrative decisions Jean took upon arriving at Trinity – with the full support of the then Warden, Dr. Evan L. Burge – was to abolish the old “reserve” section, which consisted of a locked cupboard containing mostly illustrated scientific textbooks, certain French novels and other matter which Miss Rusden regarded as indecent, or merely distasteful, and to which access was routinely denied to undergraduates, theological students, and junior tutors.

Jean was a stalwart of the Student Christian Movement in its heyday; a staunch supporter of the Uniting Church of Australia, Amnesty International, Community Aid Abroad, and the Y.W.C.A. She was endowed with a finely calibrated sense of humour, was a connoisseur of fine wine, and Chinese paintings.

Jean was not by any means intimidated by ex-Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore, Church of England bishops, wardens of colleges, or wise-cracking undergraduate sub-professional staff.

Jean died at Epworth Hospital in Melbourne on January 25, 1999. May light perpetual shine upon her.

A Touch of the Vice-Regals

There is a point early in vice-regal terms of office when, at times, either separately or in tandem, the incumbent and his or her spouse may be temporarily affected by certain vibrations arising from their elevated standing. The shorthand term used by household staffs of several generations to describe this disorder is “having or getting a touch of the vice-regals.”

At worst, in rare instances, the sufferer may for brief periods behave like Middle European royalty.

Davis and Jean McCaughey were unusual in that so far as I am aware they never once suffered from this inconvenient vice-regal syndrome. Indeed, at times they were inclined instead to travel in the opposite direction.

Certainly they seemed never to notice when the organizers of huge events like the V.F.L. Grand Final paid far more attention to starlets and political hacks than the sovereign’s representative.

At times it was incumbent on their staff to attempt to stand on ceremony on their behalf, when clearly they would never themselves voluntarily choose to do so.

On Grand Final Day in 1988, for example, at the enormous, chaotic lunch put on by the V.F.L., one sensed that few people in the room even knew who Davis was. But on that occasion it so happened that Olivia Newton-John was present in the room, swamped by admirers and Les Patterson lookalikes – she was to sing the National Anthem.

A generalized sense of astonishment overcame the entire gathering when Miss Newton-John beat a path through the throng, and inexplicably threw her arms around Davis – whom, of course, she knew well because her father, Bryn Newton-John, was Davis’s predecessor as Master of Ormond, and both families grew up as neighbors.

As a result of this charming gesture, proffered so spontaneously by such a famous woman, one sensed in respect of Davis and Jean in all corners of the room, a not too subtle retraction of the jib of familiarity and offhandedness, and in its place the hoisting of effulgent spinnakers of respect.

Here I am at the age of twenty-three: evidently not doing my job properly - which is always to keep out of press photographs.

This is The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh, accompanied by the Governor and Mrs. McCaughey, and the Premier, the Hon. John Cain, M.P., and Mrs. Nancye Cain (obscured), on what used to be called the V.I.P. apron at Melbourne International Airport, Tullamarine, about to board an R.A.A.F. flight bound for Brisbane, Friday, April 29, 1988.

The Rolls still lives with the Governor-General, at Yarralumla in Canberra.

The Vice-Regal Carriage

Country tours were a lot of fun. At that time, around 1988, the Governor of Victoria had at his disposal two vice-regal carriages which could be hitched to any regular train, and shunted into a convenient siding wherever we needed to stay at our destination in country Victoria.

A miniature Government House on wheels, the vice-regal train provided a familiar, comfortable, and relatively private “home base,” together with a loyal supplementary staff of V-Line employees who joined the vice-regal party and made sure the Governor and Mrs. McCaughey were looked after properly – a cook, an aged conductor cum steward of great gentleness and good humor, and I think there were other people as well.

Here I am, smug as can be, an insufferable youth, making myself at home in the saloon.

The train gave the Governor the advantage of not needing to make invidious choices of hotel or motel accommodation in local communities where one business or another might end up feeling slighted. No doubt such scruples strike many today as entirely irrelevant, but they were not then.

In some respects the journey to Mildura, Dimboola, Hamilton, Alexandra, Sale, or Ouyen, was only as long as the drive from Government House to Spencer Street.

Both crown cars would drive us onto the platform, the vice-regal standard fluttering cheerfully on the bonnet, and – to the stupefaction of ordinary commuters with bikes, bags, and parcels – we simply boarded the train. Whereupon we unpacked, settled into the saloon, consulted our briefing documents, opened the newspaper – that was when people still read daily newspapers – and trundled with the rest of the train out of Spencer Street.

Meanwhile, as soon as we departed, Patrick Famularo and Jimmy Hermence, the drivers, would drive the crown cars on to the final destination, ready to hook up with us later in the day or early the next morning, to commence the country visit programme.

The vice-regal carriage proper consisted of two large adjoining cabins for the Governor and Mrs. McCaughey, each with an en suite bathroom, two small cabins with compact facilities for staff (us), and a comfortable saloon which doubled as a sitting and dining-room, as well as a small galley in which the gritty V-Line cook wove a mysterious, if at times slightly ponderous, culinary web.

As time passed, I started keeping certain clothes and other things in “my room” on the train, because we used it so frequently. It was perfect.

The carriage was actually built prior to a projected state visit to Australia in 1948 by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother) which never eventuated because of the King’s declining health, and was for many years used occasionally by The Queen, and in-between times by successive governors of Victoria.

By the 1980s, the railway authorities were occasionally leasing it to rock bands for their tours of country Victoria, with unfortunate consequences. It was wonderful – all fittings intact, down to the cabinetry, china, cutlery, even the Victoria Railways linen, and customized Royal Doulton potties. It was retired some time in the 1990s, though hopefully not demolished.

The second car was much older, and a relic of a far less glamorous by-gone era, not at all comfortable, in fact at top speed one had the impression that it might easily disintegrate.

On one occasion I remember being invited to ride with the driver between Stawell and Ararat, an unnerving experience because he spent most of it gleefully describing in great detail what happens when at top speed an engine collides with stray livestock.

Occasionally, in their wisdom V-Line shunted us into deeply unglamorous sidings, such as, believe it or not, the Geelong Tip, a.k.a. Siding Breakwater Road, Geelong Racecourse, in March, 1988, when the Governor’s wonderful widowed sister Mrs. Mary Park, her traveling companion Dr. Margaret Haire, and Charles Curwen were all with us.

All things considered, the system worked extremely well.

Jane Pearson

Jane Pearson was the daughter of Sir James Campbell of Aberuchill, third baronet (1723–1812), and his first wife Margaret, née Ball, who was the daughter and heir of the splendidly named Captain William Conductor Ball of Hatton Garden, London, “land commissioner for Scotland.”

As a young man, Sir James Campbell served in the Scots Greys, and was present at the Battle of Fontenoy (May 11, 1745) in the War of the Austrian Succession, which unfortunately the Anglo-Dutch-Hanoverian forces lost woefully, in what is now Belgium.

The Scots Greys were beaten on that day by the French under Marshal Maurice de Saxe, much assisted by the “Wild Geese,” the famous itinerant brigade of Irish cavalry who fought on the side of Bonnie Prince Charlie when and wherever possible, usually on the continent.

Sir James Campbell of Aberuchill, my five times great-grandfather, had two large families. With his first wife, Margaret, whom he married in the same year in which he inherited the baronetcy (sensible), he had at least two sons who survived infancy, (1) Jane’s brother Colin, a captain in the 19^th Regiment of Foot, a brevet major and eventually lieutenant-colonel of the Perth militia, who died “unmarried” in 1811, and (2) Alexander, the future fourth baronet (1757–1824).

Jane herself and one of the other issue, so inadequately described in Burke’s Colonial Gentry, all of whom died young, may well have been born at Aberuchill in Perthshire between 1755 and 1757. Her mother, Margaret, the first Lady Campbell, died in 1766, possibly in childbirth.

Sir James remarried (to Mary Ann, daughter of Joseph Burn, who was evidently a good deal sturdier than my poor five times great-grandmother), and presented him with another eight children, viz. four sons: (1) Thomas, 1769–1799, gentleman, who died “unmarried”; (2) William, 1774–1849, a writer to the signet; (3) Frederick, 1779–1816, of the 42^nd Highlanders; (4) John, 1785–1867, a surgeon; and four daughters, about whom, thanks to the meticulous suppression by Burke’s Colonial Gentry of any available detail, we know absolutely nothing.

This impressively enormous family of at least six sons and five daughters who survived infancy may have been a factor in causing Sir James to sell the estate of Aberuchill in 1772.

According to Burke’s Colonial Gentry, “in 1800 he executed an entail of the barony and estate of Kilbryde,” the Regency equivalent of taking out a double mortgage. At his death these passed in the manner of a bad check to Jane’s brother Alexander, for whom the baronetcy was at best a consolation prize.

In 1775, Jane Campbell married William Pearson of Kippenross, Perth. With ineffable ill judgment, perhaps genetically encoded, three years later Mr. Pearson is said to have lost the freehold of the estate of Kippenross in a game of dice or cards with his neighbor, John Stirling of Kippendavie, but managed to retain a lease on it for the remainder of his life.

These William Pearsons, my four times great-grandparents, had four sons and two daughters, namely (1) Commander Hugh Pearson, R.N.; (2) John Pearson, 1783–1807; (3) Major James Pearson, b. 1787, who served in the Indian Army, was awarded the Peninsular medal with Java clasp; joined the expeditions against Palembang and Nepal, and became commanding officer of the 65th Regiment at Agra; (4) William, b. 1790, “d.s.p.”; (5) Margaret, 1776–1840, who married the Rev. Dr. David Ritchie, D.D., Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; and (6) Agnes Catherine, 1780–1865, a “spinster.”

Somewhere out of this respectably fertile soup of Pearson uncles descended the thread of kinship at the end of which dangled the late Lucy Pearson, another “spinster,” who was a closer friend to Granny than she was evidently the remotest of cousins.

They must have made friends when Gran was living in England shortly before and during World War I.

In 1975 Mum and Aunt Anne, who kept in touch with Lucy, took me, aged eleven, to visit her in the comfortable but slightly forlorn flat where she lived in genteel poverty, just off Knightsbridge. We had tea, and sardines on soggy toast.

The high point in Lucy’s career was the invitation in about 1963 to sail out to Melbourne as a semi-official “companion” to Joyce, Lady Delacombe, whose husband, Sir Rohan, a former military governor of the British sector of Berlin, was lately appointed Governor of Victoria.

Although nothing at all was explicitly stated to me by Loris Callander or Charlie Curwen, who were both very much in evidence at Government House during the Delacombe era, I gather that Lucy Pearson’s tour of duty was not an unqualified success, and before long she flew back to London.

Within the vice-regal household, Lucy was known, no doubt affectionately, as “Juicy Lucy,” and the sense was quite definitely ironic.

This portrait of old Mrs. Pearson, our common ancestor, was probably painted in Edinburgh around 1828–30, when she was an old lady of about seventy, presumably around the time of her husband’s death, and she was obliged to vacate Kippenross.

In about 1860, Helen Pearson (née Littlejohn), the widow of Commander Hugh Pearson, Jane Pearson’s eldest son, brought the portrait to the first homestead at Kilmany Park near Sale in East Gippsland, when she sailed out to live in quiet retirement with her son, daughter-in-law, and their family. It passed thence to my grandmother’s sister, Aunt Mim, and down the line to our Davidson cousins.