Beresford produced his most popular writing under the nom de plume ‘A Sandalwood Cutter’, which probably reflected the year he had spent as a tutor in the York district, an agricultural area east of Perth. Imitating the novelist William Thackeray’s idiomatic depictions of ‘downstairs’ London life, he adopted the persona of a self-educated immigrant labourer who had ‘knocked about’ the colony for many years and was happy to share his homespun wisdom with anyone who cared to listen. In this disingenuous guise, Beresford took a robust anti-Establishment stance and lost no opportunity to fire shots at the political conservatism and social pretensions of patrician Perth.

Some of ‘Sandalwood Cutter’s’ columns were devoted to homely subjects such as ‘Our Boys’ and ‘Our Girls’, or were light-hearted spoofs such as ‘The Opera’ and ‘Mrs. Wagglestone’s Opinions’. Others, such as ‘Our Governor’, ‘Our Quarter Sessions’ and ‘A Word to Masters’, carried pointed political criticisms wrapped in the disarming language of a semi-literate itinerant. His pièce de résistance was probably a series of articles recounting the visit to Western Australia by the duke of Edinburgh in February 1869. In one of these, he reported an imaginary conversation over a private lunch with the young prince:

And how did you like the Colony Sir’, I says – I didn’t say Royal Highness, it’s such a mouthful and I was afraid it’d choke me if I tried it.

‘Oh much better than I thought I would. In England there ain’t any idea it’s such [a] place. I don’t think I was ever more deceived. – I thought when I come ashore – there would be nothing but convicts with ugly faces ready to rob you of a sixpence, and pleecemen thick as bees lookin’ after ‘em, and yet I couldn’t tell the ones who’d been prisoners and the ones who hadn’t’.

Yours is a queer colony [the Prince opined] but they’re queer people that govern it. Narrow minded and selfish. You won’t do any good till you get a change of rulers.

It was the instant popularity of Beresford’s column that explains how the newspaper fell for one of the oldest hoaxes in the history of literary journalism – the acrostic poem, the first letters of whose lines spell out a cheeky, or even obscene, message. (Vincent Buckley, the then poetry editor of The Bulletin, fell for this trick twice in 1960, thanks to Gwen Harwood and Tom Shapcott, prompting an abject apology from his editor, Donald Horne.)

In its fifth issue, on 2 March 1867, The Herald published some verses which had purportedly been sent in by a semi-literate up-country settler called ‘Martin Lindsay’ in order to embarrass a poetically inclined daughter who had apparently composed them. It also published an accompanying letter from Lindsay, which, imitating as it did the style favoured by ‘Sandalwood Cutter’ and complimenting him on his column, ought to have aroused Beresford’s suspicions. As ‘Willy’, the newspaper’s ‘resident poet’, it was Beresford’s error not to see through ‘Martin Lindsay’, who wrote:

Mister Editer, –

I dusn’t often com to Perth, but ger’nally tries to com to the Races, and that is how I ain’t seen your paper before. I likes this ere Sandalwood riten becos its true. I be one of them hard-fisted chaps you rite about, and com her with only a shillin in my pocket, but by hard work and the misses’ help, we are now purty well of, and appy, only missis woud have our darter sent to a Simminary to be edercated, and now she has come home purtends to faint when she’s got to work, just like you rote about the gals, and wants to have a Pianner, which I warn’t goin to let her have, only shes getting wurse, and took to makin verses. I sends you a specimen of em and wants you redikule em if the tha deserves it, mite make her stop, which if she does she shall have a Pianner which is the best of the 2. I hopes you puts the verses in and oblige.

Yours obntly,

MARTIN LINDSAY

Excuse this riten but I dusnt like any body to no who rote the verses or I would a-got it rote by somebody which I does when I’m at home.

M.L.

In a note accompanying the letter and the ‘varses’, Beresford played along with what he must have thought was a harmless jape. He implored Miss Lindsay to cease writing ‘varses’ and accept her father’s offer of the ‘pianner’, otherwise she would ‘surely become an old maid, or something worse’. He concluded cheekily: ‘We shall be glad to hear from M.L. as often as his pressing duties will permit. We regret that the edercation of his “darter” received at the “Simminary” totally unfits her for the wash-tub and dish rag duties of her future life.’

When the huge joke at their expense was pointed out to them by D.B. Francisco, owner of the Crown and Thistle Hotel in Fremantle’s High Street and evidently a keen Saturday morning reader, The Herald’s embarrassed staff made frantic efforts to buy back every copy that had been sold. This they did with some success: no privately owned copy seems to have survived. If it did, it would surely be a collector’s item. However, they could not so easily repossess the copy sent to the Colonial Secretary’s office, which was duly preserved down the years until its eventual deposit with the Battye Library of Western Australian History, in Perth. It is from this copy that the acrostic can now be revealed, not from any prurient impulse or desire to shock, but to suggest that, beneath its cloak of respectability, mid-Victorian Fremantle was very much alive. You will see, if you look at the poem carefully, that the first letters of each line when read in sequence spell out a warm, if vulgar, tribute to the female sex, or at least to the female sexual organ.

Potry from My Darter

I love, oh! How I love to hear
Love’s tender accents greet mine ear;
On peerless fancies I arise,
Veiled in a thousand mystic sighs.

E’er as my thoughts at midnight roam,
A hallowed glory seems to come;
Placid and grand to make my breast
Lucient with gems from pleasure’s crest.

Unfolding in each gentle glance,
Mutual splendor to entrance;
Pure and sweet I see in all,
A transport boundless to enthrall.

Nor can I shun so fair a sight,
Dazzled with beauty infinite;
Rich with perfection do I view,
O’erlade with smiles a charming hue.

Such as a seraph might possess,
Yea, with its thrilling loveliness,
Charming and sweet love fills my heart,
Up in the sky, or in life’s chart.

No greater joy I ask than this,
To soothe my soul with pleasure’s kiss
Yes, yes, no greater boon I crave,
On mortal sod than love to have.

Unaltered through life’s sad career,
Bound with a purity sincere,
Ever to truth and linked to peace,
‘Til this lone vital spark shall cease.

Eventually, The Herald was able to track down the clever hoaxer. Threatening to expose the wicked genius, it explained that he had given the verses to his accomplice’s innocent wife to copy out, and that the handwriting was similar to that of another letter received from her. Having claimed at first that the embarrassment had almost forced the newspaper to close down, its editors now blasted the author and his accomplice for their infamy and expressed their warm appreciation of the wave of public sympathy that the incident had brought.

Needless to say, The Herald was henceforth more careful about publishing what it called ‘poetical effusions’ from its readers, telling a correspondent called ‘Clio’ three months later that it could not publish her poems ‘unless accompanied with a guarantee that they contain no hidden meaning’. Most of the poetry that subsequently appeared was drawn from British sources; the few pieces identified as being of colonial origin were mostly colourless efforts bearing no reference to any particular place or person.

One original colonial poetic gem, however, was a satirical piece in the style of Lord Byron also penned on the occasion of the visit of the Duke of Edinburgh. The Herald published the poems and short stories of the brilliant young Fremantle poet Cornelius (‘Con’) Hayes, who died of tuberculosis at the tender age of twenty-three, in April 1883. Other short stories, such as ‘Zillah: A Tale of The Great Deluge’, which appeared in the first issue of the paper, were published in serialised form, sometimes as special supplements. Titles such as ‘Sophie’s Confessions’, ‘Convents and Coquetry’ and ‘Adolphe de Crevecouer: A Tale of the Crusades’ suggest the subject matter. Historical romances were as popular with people in Fremantle then as they are today.

What became of the practical joker calling himself ‘Martin Lindsay’ nobody knows. Once his identity was known to The Herald, there was little chance of his ‘riten’ appearing in print again. The incident had ultimately worked in the newspaper’s favour, but only at the cost of some red faces at the corner of Cliff and High Streets.