I think it is a wonderful choice Rita. It's such a beautifully healthy and vigorous plant - and it gets no pampering in this garden! It's very obliging - seems to be equally happy on a fence, around a pole or up a tree. The foliage always looks good - the foliage is nicely dense - and the blooms are lovely - especially lovely in the winter for us. The prickles are sharp and it needs to be handled with respect. Have just given it a bit of a trim and tidy-up so the memory of the sharp prickles is fresh. And it's an Australian sport.
Your post here brought to mind a letter from Sylvia Hannah, who lives in Northern NSW. She and her friend Nancy Rudgley are great lovers of heritage roses and were very active in past years, collecting and sharing old roses.
Sylvia wrote this about her 'Clg Comtesse de Labarthe' (which she called 'Clg Duchesse de Brabant'):
"My two sources were, first from a friend in Sydney. She was not a gardener, but said her father had planted it in 1925. It was struggling in sandy soil, and not in the least did it look like a climber.
The cutting I struck certainly romped in my garden. (Her plant would have been 60 years old.)
The second source was a cutting I grew from a heritage rose open day, at Heather Rumsey's nursery in Dural. We live an hour or so below the Queensland border and I had gone down to Sydney, broken wrist, in a sling, especially to meet all those wonderful people who could open the gate to the world of old roses for me. I had a great day. At the end, there were some rose specimens, which folk had brought for identification, in a jar. These were shared, and 'Clg Duchesse de Brabant' was rooted, and growing lustily for me, in no time. A nice reminder of a happy day shared with nice people."