A wild colonial boy

I recently became a paid subscriber to Sam Dalrymple’s ‘Travels of Samwise’, mostly in order to gain access to some of his pieces on Delhi.

What I appreciate most about Sam’s newsletter, aside from its always interesting insights into the forgotten or esoteric, is its heavy visual element: every piece is extensively illustrated with photographs of what he’s talking about. After I read his piece on Delhi’s hidden Hindu temples, I found myself paying more attention to my own surrounds, even in Port MacDonnell, where I recently spent a month with my parents to make up for the fact that I’m not going to be spending Christmas with them. I found myself going out of my way to visit attractions that, growing up in and around Mount Gambier, were always there, as plain as day, but to which I had never paid much attention.

Dingley Dell is one of these. The former home of Adam Lindsay Gordon, who lived there between 1864 and 1867, the cottage is a fifteen-minute bike ride from my parents’ house on the Port MacDonnell foreshore. Despite this, I had never visited it until late last week.

Gordon was born in Charlton Kings, Gloucestershire, in 1833. He was in every respect a child of Empire. His father had been a Captain in the Bengal cavalry and his mother came from slaveholding money. (Her father, Robert Gordon, had at one time been Governor of Berbice, a formerly Dutch colony captured by the British in 1796, in what is today Guyana.) The couple were first cousins.

Gordon was educated at Cheltenham College and the Royal Worcester Grammar School. In between, he attended the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, where he was a contemporary of Gordon of Khartoum and Gunner Jingo. He was eventually asked to leave the academy on account of his undisciplined behaviour. Having proved himself a bit of a wild child—at one point he is said to have won a steeplechase on a horse he had technically stolen, and he himself later admitted that his “strength and health were broken” in his youth “by dissipation and humbug”—his father packed him off to Australia, where there was an opening in the South Australian Mounted Police. “You won’t care a bit about leaving everyone behind you,” his father is said to have told him, “and precious few will care about your leaving, either.”

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