The Eccentric Mr Wienholt

time.

Prologue

Arnold Wienholt’s daughter Anne has lived in America since 1945 and has made her name as an artist. Long before she was born in 1920, her father had made his name as a highly decorated Australian war hero and an experienced big game hunter. In his life of adventuring Arnold should have died many times over. From 1913 to 1940 he was rarely out of the news, often out of Australia, and usually hundreds or even thousands of miles away from his daughter. For him, home was either his model farm in southeast Queensland or a tent deep in the African forest. As Anne attended an exclusive boarding school south of Sydney, they did not share a run-of-the-mill family life. It left them little opportunity to really get to know each other. When she last saw her father, Anne was just nineteen. She had won her first art scholarship, and was studying art under William Dobell. Arnold was preoccupied with the plight of Ethiopia and still — in his sixties — working as an intelligence agent. In September 1940, he mysteriously disappeared.

Arnold Wienholt was more wedded to the romance of adventure in Africa than to the comforts of home life in Australia. When he wasn’t championing the British Empire in three wars or taking the mickey out of the Opposition in Parliament, he liked to spend eight months of every second year hunting big game in central Africa. At the same time he successfully managed the widely dispersed Wienholt pastoral empire, travelling the length of Queensland to properties up to a thousand miles away. For his only child the little bit of family time in occasional school holidays was precious. Yet it was never enough for her to fully understand this important and distant father who had always been a man’s man. She was well into her seventies before his full story was pieced together.

Only a handful of family letters are left to explain the enigma of Arnold Wienholt’s private life. The public Arnold could well have been called Wienholt of Africa. His life in many ways parallels and at times surpasses that of the legendary Lawrence of Arabia. It is writ large in hundreds of yesteryear’s newspaper stories, lies buried deep in official archives and parliamentary Hansards and is lauded in the memoirs of other heroes who fought for Empire. His four books of his adventures say a lot about Africa but little about himself.

In his own way he tried to be a caring father but he knew more about horses than he did about handling the little daughter he saw only at rare intervals. His childhood had been ruled by a German governess and twelve years of harsh, impersonal boarding schools. Discipline he understood. It worked in his world of employees and animals, native bearers and porters, and with soldiers at war. A solitary man with a strong sense of obligation, he wanted and needed to be liked, but his emotions were buried deep inside himself. He was ever on guard against being overtaken by spontaneous emotion. No one really relaxed in his company, least of all his small daughter. When she was nine and at boarding school she put a lot of effort into writing him a warm and loving letter. Thinking he was doing the right thing, he returned it with corrected spelling and punctuation. It was only in 1940, when he sat alone and frustrated in the international melting pot of Aden, awaiting yet another call to war, that he began lowering his emotional guard. It was only then that his letters to his wife, Enid, and daughter, Anne, give something of himself, a belated reaching out for their understanding. It was as though he was now seeing the reality of his private self instead of the public man he always aspired to be. He may also have sensed that death once again was stalking him.

1

The Boy is the Man

1877-96

Empire was Arnold’s lodestar. He was born at Goomburra on Queensland’s Darling Downs in 1877, the year Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress. By the time he was six the family had moved to England where at boarding school he began twelve long years of indoctrination into the glories of Empire. In that upper-class Boys Own world he became captivated by the image and the symbolism of Britain’s Imperial lion. It gave him a cause for which to live and fight. Then, as an intrepid novice hunter in Africa, he was savagely and repeatedly bitten by a wounded and angry lion. Abandoning its human prey, the beast left him in the forest, semi-conscious and likely to die.

As a teenage student at Eton College this stoic young Australian showed his determination and courage in the different arena of the football field. Wall game they called it, and during a season of muddy gladiatorial struggles it made him a demi-god to the other boys. The intoxication of their acclaim and attention breached his natural reserve, giving him a covert but lasting hunger for fame.

For those with money the late nineteenth century was a golden age of Imperialism, especially in the colonies, and Arnold Wienholt was one of many young British-educated men who rejected a life of luxury and opted for adventure. It was, they said, for Queen and country. He pushed the boundaries further than most. For him duty was as compelling as ambition, and ambition was as compelling as adventure. He liked the unpredictable challenge in life. Along with his rather withdrawn personality, this made him develop into an intriguing and enigmatic man. He was the eldest son of the wealthy Edward Wienholt — one of four pioneering brothers who, in the 1850s, had pressed north and west to carve profitable sheep and cattle stations out of the untamed outback. Australia’s northern frontier had only recently been opened for pastoral settlement and Aboriginal resistance led to bloody conflict.

Just as fame was the spur for the young Arnold, so was money the life goal of his father. Very few Wienholt men lived mundane lives. They liked to be where important things were happening. One of Arnold’s challenges was that, when his stocks were low, two of his cousins seemed to be more newsworthy than he. Back in the early nineteenth century the English Wienholts’ wealth had stamped them as traditional gentry: an advantage which helped many pioneering young Britons who emigrated to the colonies to expand their fortune. Colonial tradespeople and small farmers deferred to the leadership of the better educated, and supposedly better bred, squattocracy. Like many before them, those first Wienholt brothers found it helpful to claim aristocratic connections. They cherished the less conventional and more exotic strands of the family genealogy. Although they claimed a castle in Laugharne in Wales, they had been merchants for three hundred years. It was true that the estate in Wales they leased from a Miss Ann Starke was strewn with the moss-covered stones of a one-time Norman castle, but this was home to rabbits, not people. The Starke family had inherited the land in 1700, one hundred years before Arnold’s grandfather paid them his first rent. Nevertheless, their home on the estate was a comfortable two-storied Georgian gentleman’s residence. Not so old was the family’s claimed coat of arms. It depicted grapes quartered with sea-shells and was in fact their merchant trademark of wine and salt. The family’s use of such embroidered tales gave later generations a sense of ancestry which was important to them. They all grew up believing the story and, for Arnold, living up to it was a motivating force behind many of his own adult exploits. It was only with the unravelling of his life and adventures that his daughter learned the trademark origin of the supposed family coat of arms.

The Australian pioneering Wienholt brothers were spectacularly successful. The first brother (also named Arnold) arrived in 1847 — a time of protracted frontier conflict with the Aboriginal population — and bought Strathmillar station on Queensland’s Darling Downs, renaming it Maryvale. He was followed in 1852 by the nineteen-year-old Edward and they bought and stocked large acreages west and east of the Dividing Range, and manned them with sponsored British and European immigrant artisans and labourers. By the time the nineteen-year-old Arthur arrived in 1854, Edward — aged just twenty-one — had begun a meteoric career in finance and land dealing. He became the shrewd business head of the family, an astute politician and, in 1877, the father of the twentieth-century adventuring Arnold Wienholt. Given his father’s wealth and business acumen, the younger Arnold had a hard act to follow.

Within six years of the brothers’ arrival they owned Maryvale and Gladfield on the fertile black soil of the Darling Downs as well as the extensive Fassifern station below the range and closer to the port of Moreton Bay. These holdings totalled 138,300 acres. The colonial population was far too small for there to be much demand for meat, so the holds of the speedy clipper ships sailing to England were filled with Wienholt wool which gave them the wealth to expand even further. With William Kent they bought the prize Rosalie Plains, and in the late 1850s added Blythdale on the Maranoa River and Degilbo on the Burnett. Their combined commercial interests produced enough wool, tallow and hides for their older brother Daniel to come out to Australia and set up the merchant partnership of Wienholt and Walker in what was hoped to be the big trading centre of Ipswich. In 1863 Edward joined William Kent to pay £108,000 for the Darling Downs showpiece, Jondaryan station. To this he added East Prairie, Lagoon Creek and Mt Flinders. In the early 1870s the brothers moved further west with other pioneers to the Mitchell area and took up Saltern Creek, Katandra and Warenda, all vast leaseholds on which they invested considerable money in stock and expensive improvements. They also owned Mt Hutton on the Upper Dawson, and the agricultural properties of Rosewood and Tarampa below the Dividing Range close to their Fassifern holding. Success piled on success and by 1867 there were forty-nine Queensland runs owned or part-owned by Edward Wienholt and the Wienholt brothers. Edward, now aged thirty-four, was one of the wealthiest squatters in Australia.

Aloof by nature, Edward was far too busy expanding the family holdings and making money to enjoy a social life or to settle down. Although, his discerning eye saw the potential and the commercial value of the land, his heart didn’t warm to it. Always dressed as a country gentleman, he rode hundreds of lonely miles to keep his sharp eye on family interests, maintaining all the while his social distance. When not riding rough bush tracks in the heat and dust of the harsh outback, he lived in the exclusive comfort of Brisbane’s Queensland Club. He was forty-one before he felt the need to consider an heir and selected an advantageous marriage to Ellen, the demure and attractive nineteen- year-old heir of property owner and railway developer Daniel Williams. He installed her in style in a spacious new stone homestead at Goomburra, a high, lonely valley sheltered by the rugged mountains that separated the station from the coastal plain. Ten years later, when Edward’s father-in-law died, Ellen and their children inherited four large cattle properties: Widgee, Mondure, Boothulla and Grassmere in the Wide Bay Burnett area. Edward now controlled a vast and complex business empire. At its heart was a hierarchical — almost feudal — pattern of life on the many Wienholt properties. This empire was a responsibility which his eldest son Arnold would eventually be expected to manage.

By the 1870s, when wealthy squatters were resisting closer settlement and devising schemes to prevent the forced sale of the large leasehold properties they had improved at great cost, both Edward and his older brother were elected to the Queensland Parliament. They used their political power aggressively to protect squatters’ interests. The colonial press dubbed Edward the ultra squatter of the Queensland Parliament. With other wealthy land owners such as Taylor and Tyson, the Wienholt brothers actually increased their holdings at the expense of small selectors. It wasn’t long before Edward’s tactical manoeuvres to protect his company dealings became a colonial scandal. His biggest deal — exchanging 20,611 leasehold acres of Allora land to gain 41,222 freehold acres of Jondaryan — made their Jondaryan station one of the largest freehold properties in Queensland. Many of the big land-owners acted like kings in their own fiefdoms and lesser lights began regarding them with suspicion. The angry small selectors on the Darling Downs were in uproar. At a protest meeting in Dalby they spoke so openly of scandal and trickery that Edward’s social and political position rapidly deteriorated. The word squatter acquired an unpleasant connotation and he was well aware that his reputation was compromised. Earlier that year, 1877, when registering Arnold’s birth, Edward had proudly listed his rank and profession as squatter. Two years later at Brenda’s birth he distanced himself from that reviled word and listed himself as stock owner.

Uncomfortable with continued bruising unpopularity, Edward packed up and returned to England in 1884. With his wife and children, now increased to five, he settled at Ross-on-Wye, operating from there as an absentee landlord. His regular long voyages to Australia to buy and sell properties meant that his wife and children rarely saw him, but the family wealth steadily increased. By 1888 he and his brothers held 289,996 acres of the choicest freehold land and amalgamated it into Wienholt Estates Company of Australia. They were also millers, mine and quarry owners, shippers and merchants, dealing in land, corn, hides, wool, timber, agricultural produce and minerals. Company assets totalled a staggering £500,000 — not counting the large Jondaryan sheep station, Edward’s joint private holding with the Kents, and the four properties Ellen inherited from her father.

As a three-year-old on an outback Queensland sheep station, Edward’s eldest son, Arnold, was already a very independent and determined youngster. When he arrived in England, aged six, he rebelled at having anything to do with women or being taught and dressed by his governess. As a disciplinary measure for his strong-willed son, Edward packed him off to The Misses Thompson’s Dormer School at Brighton for the rest of the year before he entered the Wixenford prep school in 1885. The thirteen-year-old who entered Eton in 1891 had known little home life since the family left Goomburra for England seven years earlier. He had been transplanted from the exciting freedom of an outdoors world of station hands and animals in the Australian bush to the restrictions of English town life and a household ruled by women. As well as his mother, there were now three sisters, a baby brother and a governess. His father, constantly travelling between Australia and England to oversee family interests, sired one more son, the English-born Humphrey — the last of Edward and Ellen’s six children.

Arnold’s late nineteenth-century boarding school life, beginning at the age of six, led to acute emotional deprivation which later became apparent in the bleakness of his marriage. He had inherited his father’s aloofness, but the child was thrust into an all-male world of little kindness and frequent callousness, where nothing was child-centred. It was a life characterised by implicit Darwinism. Fending for himself, he discovered that he was strengthened by the daily struggle to survive. Emotionally hardened, he surrendered himself to no one. His comment many years later on his first night as a prisoner of war is an echo from those bleak memories of his first night as a new boy in a strange school: It is then in the quiet that the iron enters one’s soul.

He was anything but happy in his first few years at Eton. Bad houses were not a rarity. Platonism was everywhere. L. S. R. Byrne, a fellow student of the time, recalled that Arnold moved first from Cornish’s which was falling into disrepute and went to Hale’s, a rough place, though not all bad. When Hale died suddenly, Arnold moved to Porter’s which was the worst of the three. This was the period when the Oscar Wilde case was pending and Gladstone begged Lord Rosebery to address the College authorities on the current depravity of the school (1894). Even though there was an awareness of increased legal and social hostility to homosexuality in schools, young good-looking boys, such as Arnold Wienholt certainly was, had to learn to walk a tightrope. Homosexuality was a feature of bad houses, sometimes involving distinguished housemasters and, like bullying, was a tolerated form of licentiousness. The author Richard Ollard recalled that when the housemaster left his arrogant young prefects with power to beat or flog some thirty of their juniors, it could be a horrible place with the nightmare atmosphere of a police state. Flogging and bullying flourished. For all breaches of conduct the boys had to suffer silently the prefects’ physical punishment. Food was poor, sometimes bad, and in their freezing dormitories they stoically developed an insensitivity to their bleak and barbaric environment.

Byrne, who was with Wienholt at Cornish’s, told of Arnold’s moves to find a better house. He never abated in his keenness and was always doing something, but it must have been uphill work and a test of his strong character.

The only reference Arnold made to those days was to his confidante, his sister Brenda, in 1913 when he wrote: From his own sense of being, a man should try to live cleanly and do nothing mean or cowardly … I never made that most fatal mistake (against human nature) … As indicated by his novel use of ridicule to discipline dishonest bearers in Africa, beating another man was also anathema to him and had probably disgusted him since schooldays. As a young boy he had possessed the will to resist harassment from the seniors. Young as he was, he was sure of himself and what he stood for.

At Eton Arnold came under the spell of the stories of classical Greece. The school drew on the precepts and images of this ancient culture to create a special code of honour for its students. A gentleman was expected to be brave, loyal, courteous, modest, pure, honourable and endowed with a sense of noblesse oblige to women, children and social inferiors. The boys learned early that to openly break the code was to be labelled a bounder. Most didn’t want to be tarred by its despicable connotations, so the code was commonly accepted but honoured in the breach. The strongly individual Arnold Wienholt adopted and held that code almost as a physical possession and tried to live up to it until the day he died.

Like most young boys he was fascinated by the idea of fighting and warfare and he soon developed an interest in militarism. Much of it came from the strong influence of his headmaster, a flag-waving imperialist appropriately named Dr Warre. Floreat Etona expressed in patriotism was everywhere. Morning and night in their dormitories boys were confronted with a print of Lady Butler’s painting, Disaster at Majuba Hill, showing an officer with uplifted sword charging deathward to the cry Floreat Etona. Even more persuasive was the long line of memorial plaques honouring generations of old boys who had died for their country. Those plaques made Arnold acutely aware that while other boys’ ancestors bore names which were repeatedly hallowed on such bloodied fields as Corunna, Waterloo and Sevastapol, where the flower of Britain’s youth served and died in a blaze of glory, his ancestors had no history of war heroism; they were merchants, questing after commercial success in India and Australia. Money he rarely thought of — it was always there. Determination to win was the bright beacon. When his boisterous enthusiasm on the sports field triumphed, his whole being swelled with satisfaction. For him that was what it meant to be a man. To disgrace the school on the playing field or the battlefield was an unforgivable offence. He proved to be particularly susceptible to Eton’s indoctrination; it governed both his public and private life.

It was also at Eton that he developed an admiration for the ideal of the athletic male, a product of manliness crossed with a classical curriculum whose hero was a Greek boy hurling a javelin. It was an ideal he readily absorbed. As he made no lasting friends at school — or as an adult — this Platonic ideal filled the void. Always alert to the beauty of the young male form, he noted it years later on the backs of his photographs of young African Bushmen and Ethiopians. He saw it in the young hunter, Ben Johnson, who shared his wartime experiences patrolling in Africa. He came to believe strongly in the Victorian-Edwardian idea that one facet of manliness was to crush sin. Into such a niche, boys like Arnold — who were not consumed by adolescent sexual passions — fitted comfortably. In the avidly read Boys Own adventure books, pluck equalled manliness, young Englishmen were imbued with an air of command, and the gentleman always defeated the bounder. The school concept of the athlete hero, disciplined to superb fitness of body and mind, who went on to win glory for his country and for Eton, was especially appealing. He was one of many young boys who admired such heroism. At Eton he developed into a formidable boxer, never giving in while he could still stand and see. Physical fitness became the fetish it was to be for the rest of his life, accompanied by a contempt for backsliders.

At school Arnold quickly discovered that the bullying and fag system meant the strong were most likely to rule. Unlike his namesake uncle whose untamed aggression found an outlet in duelling which got him into trouble with the law, Arnold’s aggressions were dissipated when he discovered the satisfaction of pitting his wits in well-matched contests — and winning. He played in the cricket eleven for three years, in Oppidian and mixed wall elevens for two, and in 1896 he was captain of all three teams, the first Etonian to hold all three appointments; a sportsman’s apotheosis. As captain of the wall game, Eton’s famous and savage brand of football in which players have been known to suffocate in the mud, he knew the extremities, straining every nerve and sinew to encourage his team to victory. In his last season he became an Eton demi-god for the younger boys; his ears ringing with the loud applause of the school. It was the ultimate in hero-worship. He found that fame pleasurably addictive.

One fruit of his athletic fame was his election to Pop, an elite Etonian group which was raised to importance by its mystique, its privilege and its power. A self-electing society of twenty or thirty glorious young men, they were permitted to exhibit all the trappings of success. The ultimate in dandyism, they wore bright-coloured waistcoats, flowers in their buttonhole, braid on their tailcoats and finely checked spongebag trousers. They could walk arm-in-arm, wave to rather than salute their masters, sit in their club, beat anyone, fag any lower boy and get away with minor breaches of discipline. In his book on Eton, Christopher Hollis describes their group narcissism at chapel. After everyone else is seated for the service, the arrival of the Ram, a double-file procession of seniors, largely Pop and the select, provides a spectacle which he describes as Eton worshipping itself. The solitary Arnold’s election was not because he was gregarious or fun to know. His election to Pop was his reward as the all-conquering athletic hero. The separation of the public and private aspects of his life had already firmed.

In his final year, the sartorial elegance of Pop meant little other than as a proud badge of his fame and sporting prowess, but membership of Pop taught him much more. He discovered he could be as eccentric as he chose. A strong traditionalist, he could also thumb his nose at tradition. When Eton’s headmaster asked him to tea, he couldn’t refuse and was quietly pleased at the invitation but, basking in the licence extended to members of Pop, he went along in his bedroom slippers — just to show how little he cared for such things. The black looks of the headmaster no doubt gratified the rebel in the teenage Arnold. Throughout his life his sincere desire to do his best for his country, and his need to be noticed and liked, are often in conflict. As a member of Pop he found the flamboyant ritual satisfying for it allowed release of his other intense need: to express aggression. The ease he later found in asserting his will was emerging. The exquisite satisfaction of being one of the noticed who ruled, lay close to the surface for the eccentric Arnold Wienholt. It worked to his advantage in wartime adventures but worked against his ability to relate to people and make friends.

The handsome and muscular young man who left Eton in 1896 was serious faced. His tawny eyes discouraged familiarity, burning far into the distance. He was no adventuring merchant going off to Australia, but landed gentry eager to emulate the famous men of history who had found the taste of Empire strong. He carried with him a mental library of the stories of Greek and Roman heroes and the biblical philosophers he was to quote so frequently throughout his life. Trained to believe in the competitive aggression and romantic violence of the Victorian age, he put more value on physical prowess than on academic or artistic achievement. His loyalty was to Britain and his sense of duty acute, but his immediate task