The Restless Constable

James Barnes was born on 31 March 1854 at Garnett House, in the little township of Strickland Ketel, near Burneside, about three miles from Kendal.¹ This is the southern edge of the Lake District, in the old county of Westmorland - the part of Cumbria known for its walkers and poets, its stone-walled fields and its soft green hills under hard grey weather. It is beautiful country, and it is hard country, and the Barnes family were part of it in the fullest way.

Garnett House itself was no ordinary farmhouse, and it is worth pausing on, because it was the very first thing the world ever set in front of James Barnes. It is an old, old place - old enough to be a listed building today. Behind its plain eighteenth-century front stands a sixteenth-century range built around a small medieval tower, one of the squat defensive "pele" towers thrown up across this border country between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, when raiders came down out of Scotland and a farming family kept its people and its beasts behind walls four feet thick. Only in the more settled years after the Act of Union in 1707 did such fortress-farms ease into ordinary homes. Older still is the house's one brush with the great world: in the early 1500s Garnett House belonged to Sir Thomas Parr of Kendal, whose daughter Katherine Parr would become the sixth and last wife of King Henry VIII.⁴⁵ This was the house a Cumbrian farm boy grew up in - thick-walled, stone-flagged, slate-roofed, half a thousand years deep - and, entirely in character, it was the house he could not wait to leave.

They were no newcomers. The Barnes had farmed this corner of the fells for generations, with a branch of the family further north at Orton, in the high limestone country toward the Eden valley.² They were the kind of long-settled, respectable, church-going people a district is built on - known at market, known at chapel, their name on the same fields their grandfathers had worked. James's father, Anthony Barnes, held Garnett House as a tenant farmer, working some 188 acres with the help of three labourers.¹ A tenant, note, not a landowner: he farmed another man's ground, however well, and paid his rent at the term days. The family were people of some standing in the parish for all that: James's father and grandfather sat on the local juries and helped oversee the parish funds for the poor, and they carried off prizes for their cattle and their vegetables at the district agricultural shows.² It was a comfortable, standing sort of life, but it was not his own land, and there is something in that fact that helps explain the son who could not wait to leave it.

James was the third surviving child of Anthony and his wife, Margaret Ellwood.¹ He was named for his uncle, James Martindale Barnes, a well-known botanist of mosses and ferns, a man of some local reputation from the same Selside stock - a reminder that this was a family that produced more than farmers.² When the census-taker came round in the spring of 1871, James was seventeen and set down plainly as a "farmer's son", one of a full house of brothers and sisters helping to work the land.¹

A farmer's son he was; a farmer he would not be. We do not know exactly what turned him outward - only that, alone among a family who stayed close to home, James looked past the fells. He was a boy who studied maps. The world in the 1870s was opening up to people like him as never before. Steamships were beginning to shorten the great oceans; colonial governments on the far side of the earth were crying out for young men and women, and helping to pay their fares. More than half of the migrants who left for Australia and New Zealand in those years travelled on an assisted passage.³ Ships left the ports of the north of England every week for places that, on a schoolroom map, looked almost impossibly far. James decided to go and see them - though, as it turned out, he went the long way round.

James reached Australia by the roundabout road, and told the story himself, near the end of his life, in a retirement speech a Bathurst paper wrote down almost word for word.⁵ He came out, he said, through New Zealand, where he "spent his time in travelling about the country", before he landed at Sydney on the ship Hero in 1876.⁵ Of those New Zealand years no record survives at all, and of his first years in Sydney almost nothing - two silent stretches near the start of a life that is otherwise remarkably well documented. It is worth pausing on the silence rather than papering over it. A single young man with no property, drifting from place to place looking for work, simply left little behind him; there are hints in the records of a James Barnes moving about the colony in these years, but nothing that can be pinned down for certain beyond his own word that he arrived. We name the gap, and leave it open.

What is certain is that in 1880, in his twenty-sixth year, he joined the New South Wales Police, and was almost at once sent up-country to Temora.⁶ Temora was a latecomer among the goldfields. The great rushes of New South Wales had been thirty years before, in the 1850s and 60s; by 1880 most people thought the easy alluvial gold was long gone. Then, in the autumn of that year, payable gold was found on the dry plains near Temora, and the old madness came back all at once. The field was proclaimed in June 1880, and within about five weeks perhaps twenty thousand people had poured in from every direction.⁷ They threw up a "bark town" half a mile long - tents, hessian humpies, bark shanties, Cobb and Co. stables and a rough street of hotels - almost overnight, on a flat that was chronically short of water. The diggers were so thick in the low scrub that they "cooeed" to find one another; the puddling machines turned all day, working the wash-dirt for a few grains a dish. Into this raw, crowded, thirsty rush a brand-new probationary constable walked with his baton, to keep the peace among men who had come to get rich or die trying.⁷

It was hard, hot, thankless work, and even the most patient man frayed under it. In March 1882, only weeks before he changed his life, James lost his temper. In the barracks a fellow constable, John Simmons, taunted him - called him a "softhead" - and James, who was by every other account one of the mildest men in the force, struck him. It went to court. He was charged with the assault, and it must have stung badly for a careful, respectable man to stand there and answer for it. What is telling is how the case went: witness after witness got up not to damn him but to defend him, calling James "one of the best-tempered men I have met." He was fined three shillings, a trifle in money but not in pride.⁸ It is the single blot on an otherwise clean record, and, oddly, it makes him more likeable, not less: even the patient have a breaking point, and his came from a jibe, not from cruelty.

Then, weeks later, in April 1882, came the gold. On his rest days James had been quietly working a claim of his own, and he struck what he called "a good find." As he told it, "with the restless fever in him, born of his wanderings in New Zealand," he decided there and then to quit the force and turn the gold to the use "that best suited his temperament."⁹ This was the gambler's logic of the diggings: a single lucky wash was enough to make a man throw over steady, pensionable work and gamble the rest on a dream. It was enough for James. But the dream he chased was not another claim. It was home.

He went back to Sydney, drew his gold, and boarded a homeward-bound ship, meaning to go back to the north of England for good. Whether it was still a sailing ship or one of the new steamers now shortening the run we cannot say for certain; either way it was a long haul, many weeks at sea, out around the underside of the world, the seasons running backward as he went. He had left as a farmer's son of little means; he came back a travelled man with money in his pocket, and he must have imagined the walk up the lane to Garnett House a hundred times on the way.

And then it did not take. "When London was reached," the paper recorded him saying in his dry way, "the acclimatised Antipodean found the cold too much for him."⁹ After years under the hard sun of the Riverina, the grey English winter got into his bones and would not come out. There was more to it than the weather, as the next scene will show; but the weather is what he said, and it will do as a shorthand for a deeper truth. And here is the true measure of how little the old country still held him: within a few months he was heading south again on the very same ship that had carried him home - by his own telling the identical vessel, as though he had scarcely had time to step ashore. He had crossed the whole world twice in under a year, chasing a home that turned out to be behind him, not ahead. After a lapse of about ten months out of uniform, he was back in the force, "representing the law at Deniliquin."⁵

The years from 1883 to 1891 were country policing at its hardest, and thanks to James's service card we can now follow them almost month by month.¹⁰ He was sworn back in at the Sydney depot in January 1883 and posted to Deniliquin, a settled Riverina wool town on the Edward River, home of the famous Peppin merino stud.¹⁰ After the roar of Temora it was steadier work, but real work all the same: the records show him there in 1883 and 1884 taking part in a run of arrests - a conspiracy case in which he and two other officers took up three men, Mason, Purcell and Dixon, and a robbery in which he and Constable Geraghty arrested a woman named Annie Wilson over the theft from a Chinese storekeeper, Charley Ah Song.¹¹ It is the ordinary grist of a country constable's life, and it is worth showing because James rarely spoke of it; the newspapers did.

From Deniliquin he was sent for a first short spell to Wentworth, from September 1885 to March 1886.¹⁰ It is worth pausing on, because it means James walked the wharf and worked the lock-up of that river town a full six years before it gave him a wife. The place of his marriage was, first, just another posting on his beat; when he came back to it in 1891 he came back to somewhere he already knew.

Then came Silverton, out on the Barrier Ranges near where Broken Hill would soon rise, from March 1886.¹⁰ This, James said, was where "the chief incidents of his career occurred," in "the wild times on the field."⁵ Silverton was the original "silver city", near its short-lived peak - it boasted nine hotels, he liked to point out, to Broken Hill's two.¹² The records say the Silverton gaol began as a small timber-and-iron structure whose cells opened directly onto the street; prisoners were locked in with leg-irons, and when the place overflowed - as a silver rush will make a lock-up overflow - the overflow were simply chained to a peppercorn tree in the open air. By James's own account the watch-house he kept was still much the same: "an old tin shed" with two heavy logs laid on the floor, to which every lawbreaker was leg-ironed for the night "in the humane fashion of the time." A single candle lit the room. The shanty looked, he said drily, rather too much like a hotel, so that drunken miners "eternally pestered the keeper for a place to be in" and disturbed his peace at all hours.⁵ It was here, too, that his duty first brought him hard up against a darkness he would one day know from the inside: he arrested a man named Frederick Hodges, charged with attempting suicide. It is the first turn of a thread that runs, quietly and terribly, through the whole of James's life - the constable called to stand between a broken man and his own hand, years before the same darkness came looking for him. And it was here, worn down by the field, that pleurisy and pneumonia knocked him flat and forced him to change his air for four months.⁵

After Silverton came three and a half years at Hay, from January 1887 to May 1891.¹⁰ Hay was a hard, hot town where the Murrumbidgee met the great treeless plain; Cobb and Co. ran a coach factory there, and the coach roads struck out for hundreds of empty miles in every direction. A large part of James's work was escorting gold and prisoner coaches over those distances - his biggest single job, he remembered, was taking a coach of criminals from Tarcutta to Silverton, two hundred and fifty miles.¹³ It was at Hay, too, that he produced the bitten ear in court, a story good enough to run in the papers. And when he left Hay in 1891, the Mayor and a few friends presented him with an inscribed gold Waltham hunter watch, "on the eve of his departure from Hay" - a small, solid mark of a country town's regard for a well-liked officer, and an object that would pass down to his only son.¹⁴

So far this has been James's story. It is time to bring in Emily, because for the next twenty years it is hers too, and because a woman who survives in the records mostly as a name on her husband's certificates deserves to be met in her own right. Emily Keziah Borrman was born on 12 November 1864 at Kangaroo Gully, one of the goldfield camps that later became a suburb of Bendigo, then called Sandhurst.¹⁶ Where the record is thin, as it is for a poor goldfields girl, we build carefully on what a childhood like hers would have been, and we say plainly when we are doing so; nothing here is invented.

Bendigo was one of the richest goldfields on earth. When the easy surface gold ran out, it was the German miners in particular who stayed and drove the deep quartz reefs hundreds of feet down, and they built a settled world of their own around the diggings - Lutheran chapels, singing clubs, and large, hard-working families.¹⁷ Emily's father, Carl Heinrich "Theodore" Borrman, was one of them: a miller's son from Steinseifen, in Silesia, who came out to Melbourne in 1849 - storm-driven in, the family story goes, by way of Portland - and worked the Victorian goldfields as a carpenter and mining man. He was a devout Lutheran, and it mattered: he and Keziah had married by a Lutheran rite at Thomastown in 1855, and the faith ran through the household.¹⁸

Her mother, Keziah Tilley, had come the other way, out from Chippenham in Wiltshire as a young Englishwoman in 1854, in the last age of sail. She could neither read nor write, and signed her marriage with a cross.¹⁹ So Emily grew up between two worlds at once - a German-speaking, chapel-going father and an English, unlettered mother - and here lies the quiet riddle of her life. She was born into a devout Lutheran family, yet she would marry James in the Church of England in 1891, and be buried by the Church of England in 1908.²⁰ Somewhere between the German chapel of her girlhood and the English church of her marriage the language softened and the church changed; the records mark the two ends of that journey plainly enough, and we leave the middle of it where it belongs, unguessed.

Like a great many young women of her background, Emily "left home, probably looking for work."²¹ Domestic service was the usual road for a girl of the diggings with no money behind her: long hours, board in the employer's house, low pay, and a blurred line between family and staff. It took her a long way from Bendigo - north across the colonial border to Wentworth, where the Murray meets the Darling, and where her brother Edwin ran a business.²² There, in service in the busy river town, she met the constable who had once policed its streets.

James came back to Wentworth in May 1891, transferred up from Hay, and this time the river town gave him a wife.¹⁰ He married Emily at St John's Church on 21 October 1891 - he a police constable of thirty-six, she a domestic servant of twenty-six.²⁰ Wentworth in the 1890s was the busiest inland river port in Australia. It stood at the meeting of the Murray and the Darling, and the trade of half the back country came through it: some ninety paddle-steamers worked the Darling, and more than four hundred craft used the port in a single year - thirty-one steamers were counted tied up in one week in 1890.²³ The wharf was the beating heart of the place, bullock teams hauling wool down to it out of the dry country. It was a busy, rough, transient town, and it kept its constable busy: James's name heads the list of Crown witnesses in more than one Wentworth court case in these years. He was made a first-class constable in March 1892, and the family settled into the police residence and lock-up on Darling Street, right in the thick of it.²⁴ He was a hard man to miss on that wharf - six feet three inches in his boots and something near eighteen stone, "not a finer built man in the whole district," as they would one day say of him.⁴⁰ And out here the river was the only real road. There were no rail lines into this corner of the colony and few made roads worth the name; to reach the up-river towns and the far outstations a Wentworth policeman travelled as everyone travelled, by paddle-steamer, working slowly up the winding brown Darling toward Menindee and beyond when a court, an inquest or a prisoner escort called him inland. The town's whole living, and much of his work, came and went on the water.²³

It was a hard decade as well as a full one, and the hardness came from the wider world as much as from the town. The 1890s were the years of Australia's worst depression: banks crashed, wool and wheat prices fell, and the long peace between the working men and their masters broke down into the great strikes. In 1892 it broke at Broken Hill. The silver field erupted when the companies cut the miners' terms, and hundreds of police were sent to hold it - James among them, one of some three hundred.²⁵ He was in the very first batch of fifty troopers sent up, carbines and all, to hold the field against thousands of angry men. It was there he first met two officers whose names stayed with him for the rest of his life - Mitchell, later Superintendent at Bathurst but then only a senior-constable beside him in the line, and Sherwood, who came up from Sydney as a sergeant with a relief of a hundred men. Until that relief arrived the fifty of them lay out in trenches scraped into the bare hill above the field, and "suffered keenly from the cold during the three days and nights in the trenches on the hill before the relief came." He called it, in his flat way, "perhaps the most stirring time" of his career. After six months of strike duty he came back to Wentworth.⁵ There is something to notice in that posting: a farmer's son from a settled English valley, sent to dig in on a bare hill against striking miners in the name of the companies and the law. He did not choose the quarrel; he was the law, and the law went where it was sent.

The wider world reached the family in harder ways too. While James kept the peace on the Darling, his youngest brother, Anthony - the baby of the Garnett House household, born in 1870 - had gone soldiering to the far side of the globe. Anthony had joined the Cape Police in South Africa, and when the Second Boer War came he was one of a small, badly outnumbered force that held the town of Kuruman under siege for weeks before it fell on New Year's Day, 1900; he was taken prisoner by the Boers. Word of it reached Wentworth in a letter that the family kept - one Barnes brother a mounted constable on an Australian river, another a prisoner of war on the African veldt, the two ends of a single Cumbrian farm family flung right across the Empire.⁴⁴

Meanwhile the family grew. Constance came in 1896, then Cecil in 1897 - born back at the family's Kangaroo Flat, for Emily went home to her mother's country in Bendigo for that confinement. Freda followed in 1900, and the twins, Myrtle and Ivy, in February 1902.²⁶ But a long shadow lay across all of it. Emily was ill. Her death certificate would later record some fifteen years of tuberculosis - the "consumption" that was the great killer of the age - which means the disease was already in the house within a year or two of the wedding.²⁷ As she weakened, her younger sister Lavinia - "Vene" - came to live with the family and help, arriving about the time the twins were born, and never really leaving.²⁸ The strain of it all - a sick wife, a house full of small children, the isolation and grind of a policeman's life, the years of it with no end in sight - gathered quietly through these years. And in January 1902 it broke.

In his retirement speech James skated over these years in a single line - "transferred from the back country to North Sydney in 1901, and in 1906 he came to the quiet village of Kelso."⁵ His service card tells the fuller, truer story, and it is worth setting straight.¹⁰ The transfer to the Metropolitan district at North Sydney came in March 1902, just weeks after the crisis - and here is the kindest reading of a hard time. A constable who had shot himself might ordinarily have lost his job. Instead the force moved James quietly to the city, kept his rank and his pay, and let him serve on. Read alongside the town's reinstatement petition and the gentle press, it looks far less like a punishment than a protection: the force, and the community, closing quietly around a well-liked man to carry him through his worst. The Wentworth paper, the Federal Standard, spoke for the whole town: Constable Barnes, it wrote, was "one of our most popular citizens, respected and esteemed by all who knew him, a man whose kindness and forbearing nature saved many a trouble in Wentworth" - a man "so well liked here that a hint of his removal at any time would have been met with stout opposition from each and every resident."³⁰

He stayed in the Metropolitan district about four years.¹⁰ It was there, in the city, that the family met its next sorrow. The elder twin, Myrtle, took ill while she was teething; she went into convulsions, and no one could help her. She died at about a year old and was buried at North Sydney - the "one female deceased" who would appear, unnamed, on later family certificates, a small grave a long way from anywhere the family would live again.²⁸

Then, early in 1906, James came out to the central west. The service card shows him briefly at Blayney, and then at Cowra, both short postings in the space of a few months.¹⁰ He had come to the district; and when the vacancy at Kelso arose he took it. In September 1906 he was appointed - on promotion - to the little village across the Macquarie from Bathurst, and into the quietest beat of his life.³¹ Kelso was a village, but only the river separated it from Bathurst, Australia's oldest inland town and the capital of its first gold country; much of James's actual work was done over there, in the Bathurst courts. A councillor once grumbled that the Kelso officer was "on duty in Bathurst all his time, even on Sundays."³²

The Kelso beat was famously idle. Only the Macquarie River separated the little village from Bathurst - Australia's oldest inland town, the capital of its first gold country - and much of James's real work was done over the bridge, in the Bathurst courts. The Kelso lock-up itself had "stood idle for ten years except as a dwelling house for the local police officer," the papers joked, until James "beat the record" one Saturday night in May 1908 by lodging a man named William Eddy, found very drunk on the roadway.³³ Ever since the railway had reached Kelso in 1875 the resident constable's daily duty was to walk down and meet the morning and evening trains and see who got off into his patch; that, a few unregistered dogs and the odd out-of-season duck, made up most of the crime in the quietest place he ever struck.³³

These are small stories, but they are the truest picture we have of the man at home, and they show the times as much as the man. His daughter Ivy remembered him as a "mighty pen man" - careful, thorough, a fine hand with a pen - who checked the children's homework at the kitchen table and made them do it again, neatly, if it was not right, on pain of a rap on the knuckles. His only son, Cecil, raked the white pebbles round the police station smooth every morning before school, ready for inspection. One day James and Cecil came home from shooting with a brace of rabbits and James told the boy to clean and gut them; Cecil answered back, "do it yourself" - and got a hiding with the dead rabbits for his cheek, and a spell in the Kelso cells for good measure, from which, the family laughed for years, his arms were just long enough to reach out through the bars and let himself out again.²⁸ It is a small, warm, everyday picture of a big, quiet man keeping a firm and loving order in a house full of children and trouble.

And there was trouble enough. It was a gentle place to have set down a battered man and an ailing family, but the shadow had come with them from the river. Emily had been ill for the best part of fifteen years by now - consumption, the slow wasting disease that had shadowed the whole marriage. Through all of it she had kept a policeman's house on a policeman's pay, borne five children and buried one, and followed her husband from posting to posting across half the colony: Wentworth, then North Sydney, then Blayney and Cowra, and now Kelso. Her younger sister Lavinia had come to nurse her and never left. On 3 June 1908, at the Kelso police residence, Emily died, aged just forty-three.²⁷ She was buried the next day in the Holy Trinity cemetery, her coffin carried by her husband's fellow officers under Senior-Constable Meagher, the "Dead March" played over her.³⁴ James had lost the goldfields girl he had met on Darling Street, in the quietest place he ever struck.

The last years at Kelso were, for the most part, good ones. In January 1909 James's father, Anthony, died back at Selside, aged eighty-seven, and left James a share of a comfortable Cumbrian estate - £100 in cash, ten Lancaster Banking Company shares held in trust, and an equal fifth share of the residue alongside his brothers and sisters.³⁵ The tenant's son had done well by his father in the end. And in 1910 James made a decision the family would talk about for generations: he married Emily's younger sister, Lavinia.

To understand the marriage you have to understand the years behind it. Lavinia - "Vene" - was Emily's younger sister, a good nineteen years younger than James. She had come to the family about the time the twins were born in 1902, to nurse her failing sister and help with the babies, and she had stayed. For the last six years of Emily's life the three of them shared one roof and one long ordeal: the slow dying in the back room, the house full of small children, the transfers from town to town, the worry that never lifted. James and Lavinia nursed Emily together, grieved for her together, and raised her children together, side by side, for years before there was ever a question of a wedding. When they married in 1910 it was less the beginning of something than the quiet naming of a life they had already been living - two people bound by the same long trouble and the same affection, who had earned their plain happiness the hard way.

There was a hitch, and it is a revealing one. New South Wales had made it lawful to marry a deceased wife's sister back in 1875, decades ahead of England - so the union was perfectly legal.³⁶ But the Church of England, the church of James's whole life, still refused to solemnise such a marriage on its own grounds, and would not perform it. So the couple simply went to a church that would. The certificate records a Congregational minister marrying them at the Kelso police station on 23 June 1910; the family, remembering it more roughly, said the pair had "become strict Baptists."³⁷ Either way the meaning is the same: the church that had married him to Emily would not marry him to her sister, and rather than give up the marriage he gave up the church.

He policed on, a genial, heavy-set figure in a quiet town, and the papers were fond of him. The motor car was just beginning to appear on the Bathurst roads, a marvel and a menace both, and in 1912 the local sheet ran a small joke under the heading "Constable Barnes Does a Sprint", teasing "one of the heaviest constables in the Western district" - six feet three and eighteen stone - who had somehow "caught a motor car last week."⁵ There was a serious side to the same quiet beat. Now and then his duty brought the old darkness back to his own door - the wandering man in 1911 who cried that voices had told him to kill himself, whom James, of all the constables in the district, knew exactly how to walk gently to the cells and keep safe until the doctor came out from Bathurst.⁵

He was making ready to stop. In July 1913, with his pension in sight, James did something he had never done in sixty years of wandering: he bought a piece of ground of his own. It was a block on the north side of the Sydney Road, a stone's throw from the police station, and it cost him £300 - a modest place for a modest retirement, but his, freehold, the first land the tenant farmer's son had ever owned outright.⁴⁷ That October the Bathurst Times noted, in its "Personal" column, that "First-class Constable Barnes, of Kelso, began a six months' leave of absence at midnight last night, after which he retires from the police force with 34 years' service" - and, in the paper's fond shorthand, ran through the stirring career one more time: Broken Hill in the big strike, the shearers' strike of '94, the maritime strike, "in the thick of it" every time.⁴⁶ On his sixtieth birthday, 31 March 1914 - the compulsory retiring age, to the very day - he was discharged on pension after thirty-four years' service.¹⁰ The night before, at the Police Barracks in Bathurst, his comrades gave him three silver-mounted pipes and a walking stick, and, a man of few words, he told them the whole tale of his stirring career.⁵

He had just ten weeks left, and he spent part of them on one last errand. Late in the piece he made the long journey down to Sydney to arrange for his second daughter, Freda, to go away to boarding school - a plan she did not want in the least - and it was from that trip that he came home to die. On 22 June 1914 the evening train brought him back into Kelso, and he walked up from the station to the residence a very tired man. The kitchen stood a little apart from the main house, and twelve-year-old Ivy never forgot watching him come in at the door. He told Vene he was worn out, and looked it; she told him to go through and rest in his own big easy chair while she put the kettle on. He pulled off his boots, lowered himself into the chair, and leaned his head back.

His last words, his youngest daughter would tell the family for the rest of her long life, were three:

"This is heaven."

And as he leaned back he was gone - there in the chair, with the kettle not yet boiled and his daughter watching from the doorway. He was sixty, and the cause was set down as acute cholangitis.³⁹ "Everyone that knew the deceased constable knew what a fine stamp of man he was," ran the obituary, "and perhaps there was not a finer built man in the whole district. He stood six feet three inches in height, and weighed 18 stone."⁴⁰ The next day he was buried in Emily's grave at Holy Trinity, Kelso - the two of them laid together in the one grave, where they lie still - four of his police comrades carrying the coffin and the old hymn "Rock of Ages" sung over the pair of them.³⁸

James left a small, tidy estate, and it tells you a good deal about the man. When probate was granted in September 1914, the sworn inventory came to a net value of £389 16s 2d in New South Wales.⁴¹ It is worth setting out, as a valuer would, because this is exactly what the family were left to work on. There was the Kelso land, valued at £275; fifty shares in the Hill End Amalgamated Gold Mine, worth a modest £6 5s - the last thread of a lifelong tangle with gold; the household furniture; £95 in the Government Savings Bank at Bathurst; some livestock, a carriage, and the harness and saddlery of a mounted man.⁴² His will left his gold watch and chain - the Hay watch - and his breech-loading gun to his son Cecil.⁴¹ Against the assets stood only a few small debts - to a Sydney tea merchant, a Bathurst storekeeper, and a music teacher who had been giving one of the children lessons. A further £266 of English effects, his share of his father's estate, was collected the next year through a grant resealed in England.³⁵

Put together, it came to something like £650 - a comfortable but modest sum, and about a third of the £1,900 estate his own father had left in Cumbria. There is a quiet symmetry in that. The tenant's son who walked away from the settled Barnes farm, who crossed the world twice and gave up an easy place in it, died worth roughly the single fifth-share of his father's estate that he had inherited by post. He had spent his life in motion, and ended it with a horse, a watch, a bank book and a bit of goldfield land.

The estate did not pass straight to the children. Under James's will, Lavinia held it for her lifetime, and only on her death was the balance to be divided among his surviving children. Lavinia lived on until 1939; she sold the Kelso land in 1918 and moved with the family to Bathurst, taking a house in Howick Street, near the theatre.⁴³ So the children did not truly come into their father's estate until a quarter of a century after he died in his easy chair - a long time to wait on a horse, a watch and a bank book.

It is Ivy we have to thank for most of what is warm in this book. In her nineties, half-blind, she told her family's stories down the telephone so that they would not be lost - her father coming in at the kitchen door, the nuns and the firewood, the twin who died, the homework that had to be perfect, the easy chair and "this is heaven." James Barnes let the work speak for him, and was a man of few words to the very end. His youngest daughter made sure the words were kept.