A Well-Travelled Travel Case

It is hard to tell from this photograph, but this is an open wooden box, viewed from above. Beneath the silver-topped crystal pots and trays is another layer with a velvet-lined secret drawer that pops open. It is the kind of thing I used to love as a child: I had a less sophisticated version, but it too had secret drawers – in which I kept treasures.

In a previous post, I mentioned a grape pearl cluster jewellery set. It was once kept in the secret drawer of the case shown in the picture. Honor, one of the women in my book, To Africa for a Rose, inherited both items. She loved this lustrous mahogany box and I can picture her as a girl, fascinated by the secret compartment and its contents. I feel a shared connection with her from her childhood in the 1890s and mine nearly a century later in the 1970s.

However, this box was not specifically made for jewellery but as a travel case with its own leather separate cover. It was made in London and shipped to Albany, Western Australia, as a wedding gift for Honor’s mother in 1878. It has a particular story attached to it. Honor’s mother, Ethel, married a pioneer sheep farmer, Albert Young Hassell. Ethel was unusual; as a sheltered, privileged young woman brought up in urban comfort, she chose to spend her early married life until 1886 with her new husband on sheep stations in Western Australia’s outback.

 Her parents – who supplied the travel case as a gift – were aristocratic and class conscious. They were not comfortable with their daughter ‘going so far from civilisation’, as Ethel recorded. Their expectations were that their daughter, whom they had brought up as a lady of leisure who gardened and sewed, would stay in relative comfort and safety, even though 1880s Albany was then little more than a frontier village with less than 2,000 residents.

Ethel had never spent a day outdoors travelling in a horse and cart before she embarked aged twenty-one on her outback sojourn, living among Aboriginal people. ‘I was the first white woman to visit that part of the country and I think they gazed on me with as much curiosity as I did on them,’ she recorded.

Ostensibly, the travel case’s purpose was to assist Ethel in taking care of her appearance, with its contents of brushes and perfumes. But on the sheep stations, no maids would live so remotely and Ethel had to take on all the chores of washing, baking and, in due course, bringing up a young family.

In that environment, Ethel constantly used her travel case, as she washed and changed at dusk each day to demarcate the day’s toil from a more ‘civilised’ evening. But the Hassell sheep stations were isolated. Although Ethel made friends with the local Aboriginal women and spent a great deal of time with them, learning about their culture and legends, her own British customs along with the travel case may have simply helped her cope, as a way of maintaining a sense of connection to her own family and society.

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Today, British Empire colonials of the past are often ridiculed for taking their rituals into foreign lands, such as tea parties with delicate cups and saucers even in the wilds. In the film, Out of Africa, Denys Finch Hatton famously plays classical music (on a wind-up gramophone) out in the bush. In fact, it becomes a running joke in the film. According to Karen Blixen who wrote the book on which the film was based, Finch Hatton’s safari packing list was, ‘Three rifles, supplies for a month, and Mozart.’

But perhaps the travel case reminds us of a serious side to this: that maintaining cultural rituals and personal interests or standards of appearance can also be part of a coping mechanism in an environment otherwise utterly different from one’s roots. The travel case itself served for eight years in Western Australia’s outback. In 1954 it was sent to East Africa. There, it was not used for travel, but treasured as a nostalgic link. To the family who feature in To Africa for a Rose, it still offered a sense of sophistication, even nearly a century after it was made.