Coaches

I left London by the Comet coach for Chesterfield, arrived at Chatsworth at half past four o’clock in the morning of the ninth of May, 1826. As no person was to be seen at that early hour, I got over the greenhouse gate by the old covered way, explored the pleasure-grounds, and looked around the outside of the house. I then went down to the kitchen-gardens, scaled the outside wall, and saw the whole of the place, set the men to work there at six o’clock; then returned to Chatsworth and got Thomas Weldon to play me the water-works, and afterwards, went to breakfast with poor dear Mrs Gregory and her niece (Sarah Brown); the latter fell in love with me, and I with her, and thus completed my first morning’s work at Chatsworth before nine o’clock.
— Joseph Paxton (1803 – 1865), quoted in Notes and Queries, 24 June 1865, 491.

Cobb’s coaches have the name of being very rough, – and more than once I have been warned against travelling by them. They were not fit, I was told, for an effeminate Englishman of my time of life. The idea that Englishmen, – that is, new-chums, or Englishmen just come from home, – are made of paste, whereas the Australian, native or thoroughly acclimatized, is steel all through, I found to be universal. On hearing such an opinion as to his own person, a man is bound to sacrifice himself, and to act contrary to the advice given, even though he perish doing so. This journey I made and did not perish at all; – and on arriving at Rosedale had made up my mind that twenty hours on a Cobb’s coach through the bush in Australia does not inflict so severe a martyrdom as did in the old days a journey of equal duration on one of the time-famous, much-regretted old English mails.
— Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, London: 1873 and Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1967 (edited by Edwards and Joyce), pages 413-414.

The coach was a mail-coach, with four horses, running regularly on the road every day; – but on our return journey we were absolutely lost in the bush, – coach, coachman, horses, mails, passengers and all. The man was trying a new track, and took us so far away from the old track that no one knew where we were. At last we found ourselves on the seashore. Of course it will be understood that there was no vestige of a road or pathway. Travellers are often ‘bushed’ in Australia. hey wander off their paths and are lost amidst the forests. In this instance the whole mail-coach was ‘bushed’. When we came upon the sea, and no one could say what sea it was, I felt that the adventure was almost more than interesting.
— Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, London: 1873 and Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1967 (edited by Edwards and Joyce), 685.

Fire lighted; on the table a meal for sleepy men;
A lantern in the stable; a jingle now and then;
The mail-coach looming darkly by the light of moon and star;
The growl of sleepy voices; a candle in the bar;
A stumble in the passage of folk with wits abroad;
A swear-word from a bedroom — a shout of ‘All aboard!’
‘Tchk tchk! Git-up!’ ‘Hold fast there!’ and down the range we go;
Five hundred miles of scattered camps will watch for Cobb and Co.

Old coaching towns already decaying for their sins;
Uncounted “Half-Way Houses”, and scores of “Ten-Mile Inns”;
The riders from the stations by lonely granite peaks;
The black-boy for the shepherds on sheep and cattle creeks;
The roaring camps of Gulgong, and many a “Digger’s Rest”;
The diggers on the Lachlan; the huts of farther west;
Some twenty thousand exiles who sailed for weal or woe —
The bravest hears of twenty lands will wait for Cobb and Co.

The morning star has vanished, the frost and fog are gone,
In one of those grand mornings which but on mountains dawn;
A flask of friendly whisky — each other’s hopes we share —
And throw our top-coats open to drink the mountain air.
The roads are rare to travel, and life seems all complete;
The grind of wheels on gravel, the trot of horses’ feet,
The trot, trot, trot and canter, as down the spur we go —
The green sweeps to horizons blue that call for Cobb and Co.

We take a bright girl actress through western dusts and damps,
To bear the home-world message, and sing for sinful camps,
To stir our hearts and break them, wild hearts that hope and ache —
(Ah! when she thinks again of these her own must nearly break!)
Five miles this side the gold-field, a loud triumphant shout:
Five hundred cheering diggers have snatched the horses out:
With “Auld Lang Syne” in chorus, through roaring camps they go
That cheer for her, and cheer for home, and cheer for Cobb and Co.

Three lamps above the ridges and gorges dark and deep,
A flash on sandstone cuttings where sheer the sidlings sweep,
A flash on shrouded waggons, on water ghastly white;
Weird bush and scattered remnants of “rushes in the night”;
Across the swollen river a flash beyond the ford:
Ride hard to warn the driver! He’s drunk or mad, good Lord!
But on the bank to westward a broad and cheerful glow —
New camps extend across the plains new routes for Cobb and Co.

Swift scramble up the sidling where teams climb inch by inch;
Pause, bird-like, on the summit — then breakneck down the pinch;
By clear, ridge-country rivers, and gaps where tracks run high,
Where waits the lonely horseman, cut clear against the sky;
Past haunted half-way houses — where convicts make the bricks —
Scrub-yards and new bark shanties, we dash with five and six;
Through stringy-bark and blue-gum, and box and pine we go —
A hundred miles shall see tonight the lights of Cobb and Co.
— Henry Lawson, The Lights of Cobb and Co.

The rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind?
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), Self-Reliance.

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