by Clare Wright
What if the hot-tempered, free-wheeling gold miners we learned about at school were actually husbands and fathers, brothers and sons? And what if their wives and families weren’t far away across the watery wastes, but right by their sides? What if there were women and children inside the Eureka Stockade, defending their rights while defending themselves against a barrage of military-issue bullets?
And what if the soldiers who were firing upon civilians—including women—were themselves husbands and fathers, with wives and babies crouched not two miles away within a sandbagged Government Camp?
How do the answers to these previously neglected questions change what over one hundred and fifty years of Eureka scholarship, commemoration and celebration have taught us about the so-called ‘birthplace of Australian democracy’? Who, in fact, were the midwives to that precious delivery?
And if the birth attendants included ratbag women as well as reckless men, did their vision of democracy extend beyond the abolition of a poll tax to wider subversions of old-world tyranny? Did the unbiddable women of Ballarat claim a stake for themselves as members of the popular mass movement for political reform? Did they too want the vote? Tax relief? Justice?
This book asks these questions—and, like most works of history based on primary sources, the answers throw up many more conundrums besides. Why did Ballarat experience an explosive baby boom in the mid-1850s? Why was there a routinely observed spike in domestic violence on the Victorian goldfields, which garnered the ignominious laurel of ‘the wife-bashing capital of the world’? Why were so many self-made women working alongside those famously entrepreneurial men? Why did Caroline Chisholm—the woman who once graced our five-dollar note—send a boatload of Jewish girls from London to Melbourne in 1853? And why were there so many men dressing up in female attire?
Then there are the elephant-in-the-room questions.
If there were women in and around the Eureka Stockade that brutal Sunday morning, what other outrages might have been perpetrated against them by the battle’s frenzied victors?
And the big question, hanging over my checklist of challenges like a storm cloud: why haven’t we gone down this road before? As students in an all-girls school, taught by a female history teacher, why didn’t I or my classmates ever think behind the words in our textbooks? Why did not one of us ever think to ask, where are we in this story?
Like Henry Reynolds’ ground-breaking Why Weren’t We Told?, which shattered the myth that the colonisation of Australia was a benign and uncontested process, this is the first book to retell the Eureka story complete: as it was.
Women were there. They mined for gold and much else of economic value besides. They paid taxes. They fought for their rights. And they were killed in the crossfire of a nascent new world order.
PART 1
TRANSITIONS
ONE
A VIRGIN COUNTRY
You could hear Ballarat before seeing it.
It took Charles Evans a full week to walk to the diggings. Leaving Melbourne on 9 November 1853, Charles, his brother George and travelling companion John Basson Humffray dragged a bullock dray up long steep hills and down treacherous ravines. The dray became mercilessly bogged on some stretches of the road; on others, it was all the Englishmen could do to keep the cart from overturning in potholes, sunk deep by the ambitions of thousands of hopeful immigrants. The undertaking was far from pleasant, wrote Charles in his diary. But there were compensations. Crossing a creek and preparing to camp for the night, Charles noted that:
the scene from the hills was lovely beyond expression—the sun had set and a mellow twilight and the silvery rays of a full moon shed a soft light over the beautiful landscape…I can not remember any scene in my own country…to excel it—I was going to say, perhaps even to equal it.
A series of narrow ravines marked the long-awaited end to the ninety-mile journey from Melbourne. We found to our alarm, wrote Charles, that we had one of the most dangerous and precipitous roads to descend which I ever saw attempted. The final stretch of road ascended to a high tableland, and it was up this last incline that Charles Evans finally trudged, beckoned by the siren call of a scene he could hear but in no way envision. Atop the last gully, he was surrounded by eucalyptus and casuarina trees laced with wild cherry and honeysuckle. Another chronicler arriving in 1853, Thomas McCombie, recorded his first impressions of the Golden City:
A confused sound like the noise of a mighty multitude broke upon our ears and a sudden turn of the road brought us in full view of Ballarat. I freely confess that no scene have I ever witnessed made so deep and lasting an impression on my mind.1
First, there was the barking of thousands of dogs chained outside tents and mine shafts, marking territory. Then there were the horse bells, the crack of whips, the shrill chorus of parrots and the mirth of the kookaburra. The laughing jackass, newcomers like young John Deegan called it—was the bird greeting or mocking them? There was nothing ambiguous about the uproarious blasphemy of bullock drivers, their oaths echoing across the basin. Over all, Deegan wrote years later, that vague, indescribably murmurous sound, which seems to pervade the air where a crowd is in active motion was his first impression, and it would never leave him. It was like a genuine fairy tale.
Charles Evans made his final approach in the morning, but the bewitching effect was particularly astonishing for those weary travellers who arrived at night. Henry Mundy, a twenty-year-old shepherd who had migrated from England with his parents in 1844, walked from Geelong to Ballarat to find his fortune. As Mundy later recalled, the noises and scenes were indescribable.2 Standing on the ridge, he could see only the twinkle of a thousand campfires, like a mirror image of the night sky. Yet the noise was still bellowing. During the evening meal, the talking and yelling was incessant. Later, there was the ubiquitous firing of guns and pistols, a release of the day’s pent-up emotion, and accompanying the firearms, the ever-present rolling choir of the dogs. After the ritual gunfire ceased, accordions, concertinas, fiddles, flutes, clarionettes, cornets, bugles, all were set going each with his own tune. The effect, said Mundy, was deafening.
Bug-eyed and prickle-eared, those who arrived during the prosperous months of late 1853 looked down upon a sprawling tent city. In the foreground lay the vast level diggings of East Ballarat. A creek wound through a valley of low, flat mounds and conical hills. Rising in the distance, Bakery Hill; and on the spur, the site of the original 1851 strikes, Golden Point. Perched on the plateau above the diggings was the Camp, home to the aristocracy of the canvas city of Ballarat. This is how Thomas McCombie described the officers of the Gold Fields Commission, police and assorted civil servants entrusted with administering the impetuous throng of gold seekers. Nestled beside the Camp on a neat grid of streets was an embryonic township of stores and homes, some confident enough to be constructed of timber.
Encircling the whole was a ring of green, the remnant fringe of a thick scrub that had once covered the entire basin. The diggers, observed English journalist William Howitt, seem to have two especial propensities, those of firing guns and felling trees…Every tree is felled, every feature of Nature is annihilated.3 The majority of timber was used for tent poles and mine shaft supports, but in late 1853, Ballarat was also a ravenous camping ground, gorging on wood for heat, light and fuel. The blue smoke of ten thousand campfires curled slowly upward, observed John Deegan, and blended with the haze of the summer evening.
There were so many people going about their business, remarked Thomas McCombie from his ledge on the ravine, that the ground actually appeared as if in motion. From this distance, the people of Ballarat resembled a pulsating swarm. Henry Mundy too was struck by the lively busy hive, the throb of a community in constant motion, its kinetic charge heightened by the mad flapping of hundreds of flags. Tents and stores in the flats, on the hills, in the gullies, everywhere one cast his eyes, noted Mundy, every store had two or three flags flying; flags of all nations but principally the Union Jack. In the face o
f all the overwhelming novelty, a Ballarat greenhorn like Charles Evans could at least gravitate towards the familiarity of his national ensign.
It was like some grand dream…an entrance into fairy-land, wrote McCombie. He stood for a moment and watched the frenzied bustle. Listened to the din of thousands of cradles rocking gold out of clay on either side of a creek, startled as diggers popped in and out of holes like frantic moles. It was a scene altogether so novel, unexpected and unlike the dull every-day world, McCombie recorded. The view from the hill was so extraordinary that, once venturing into the basin—a taut geological drum vibrating with human enterprise—one could only anticipate a new order of things.
Indeed, gold rush immigrants like Dr Gillespie, who had arrived on the Marco Polo in the summer of 1853, would have expected nothing less. A revolution commenced in Australia which has affected the whole civilised world, he wrote in his role as editor of the ship’s in-house journal, the MARCO POLO CHRONICLE.4 What awaited the newcomer was no less than a new chapter in the world’s history.
Ages of tyrannous bungling and bad legislation had brought the continent of Europe to the verge of a terrific outburst. Every thinking mind looked anxiously onward to the next throb of outraged humanity. The unsolved problem of human happiness or misery found kindred echoes in the hearts of all men…The Australian goldfields have postponed the day of reckoning…
It is a virgin country.
In August 1851 a blacksmith named Thomas Hiscock made a discovery in the rural backblocks of colonial Victoria that would change the lives of hundreds of thousands of the world’s citizens, not least the hinterland’s traditional owners, the Wathaurung people. Alert to the gold deposits recently unearthed in New South Wales, Hiscock went looking for payable gold in the hills of Buninyong, some 110 kilometres northwest of the port of Melbourne. And Eureka! There it was.5 The alluvial leads were deep and seemingly endless, following the trails of ancient underground river systems—mute, furtive, auspicious. Victoria, only recently separated from its parent colony New South Wales, was suddenly the only place to be. Within days, news of the strike in the central highlands had spread to Melbourne and Geelong; within weeks, eager prospectors were making their way overland from all corners of Australia, from the garrison towns of Sydney and Hobart to the modest goldfields of New South Wales to the pastoral outstations of South Australia. Nobody wanted to miss the windfall; for Victorians and their neighbouring colonists, 1852 was the year when there was ‘nothing but gold’.
Henry Mundy watched the sudden exodus to the new goldfields with a mixture of incredulity and excitement. News of gold at Ballarat, he later wrote in his reminiscences, set the Geelong people and those of the surrounding district crazy. Overnight, the workers of Australia had gone AWOL: farms, building sites, ships, police barracks, government offices, shearing sheds—all were deserted. Schools closed and postal services were disrupted as the public service staggered along on a skeleton staff. The reports in the papers drove everyone mad, explained Henry Mundy. Every shepherd, hutkeeper, stockrider, every man, woman and child. All the world and his wife were looking for and examining quartz. Journalist John Capper, embedded with the diggers, concurred that society had become to a certain degree unhinged…the ordinary course of business deranged.6 Henry Mundy’s own parents walked off their dairy and hiked to the diggings. It seemed a simple equation. Who’ll buy cows in these topsy-turvy times? wondered Henry. Beef and mutton sold for nothing; digging equipment and transport cost a fortune.
The first on the ground were those closest to home. The township of Geelong became virtually divested of men overnight. Women banded together to draw water, chop wood, mind children and safeguard each other from the perceived dangers of being ‘without natural protectors’. The famous ‘grass widows’ of the gold rush were left in the forsaken towns like the soapy ring around a bathtub. Sarah Watchwarn was one of a band of Melbourne mothers who gathered at night in a central home, a faithful Collie dog being the only guard against blacks and outlaws. Sarah had arrived with her husband Robert in 1849 and settled in the outlying seaside suburb of St Kilda. Sarah later recollected that on the news of gold, St Kilda found itself devoid of menfolk.7
But not all men wanted to leave their wives behind, and not all women would consent to be left. Anne Duke’s parents, James and Bridget Gaynor, had emigrated from Ireland to Australia in 1842, when Anne was four years old. The Gaynors moved from Melbourne, where they had witnessed the laying of the St Patrick’s Cathedral foundation stone, to the mineral springs outstation of Mt Franklin, where they worked for the Aborigines Protection Society. They were well placed to be one of the first families to arrive on the goldfields. Anne was just sixteen years old when she married George Duke; the newlyweds went straight to Ballarat. So too did Jane Curnow when her life derailed. Cornish-born Jane immigrated to Adelaide with her husband William and their five children in 1848. Months after the Curnows’ arrival, William died of sunstroke. In 1851, on news of the gold finds, fifty-two-year-old Jane trekked overland from Adelaide to Ballarat, where her oldest sons soon began providing handsomely for their widowed mother.
But the path to salvation in this virgin country was not as straightforward as it appeared. For one thing, the road was clearly signposted with the evidence of prior occupation. Every kur (tree), yalluch (river) banyall (valley), woorabee (fish) and murrulbuk (eagle)—every rock, plant and creature—was part of an integrated spiritual, political and economic system for the Wathaurung people, who had made the fertile hunting grounds of the Ballarat basin their ancestral home for tens of thousands of years. For them, the gold rush of the 1850s represented a second wave of dispossession; the first was the surge of pastoral expansion—often violent—into Victoria from the 1830s.
It is estimated that prior to European contact there were up to 3240 members of the twenty-five Wathaurung language groups. By 1861, 255 Aboriginal individuals remained in the Ballarat region. Among these survivors were ‘Caroline’, ‘Queen Rose’ and ‘Old Lady’. What these three Indigenous women thought of the molten flow of white ghosts daily disgorging into their lands is not recorded. By the time Old Lady was buried according to customary rites in Ballarat in 1860, and Caroline and Rose died at Coranderrk Mission in the 1870s, the Aboriginal history of central Victoria was already considered a queer relic of an inevitably bygone era.8
Newcomers to the goldfields from 1851 often commented on the presence of Aboriginal family groups, their dwellings and activities. When eight-year-old Scottish lad William McLeish arrived at Ballarat in 1854 he was delighted to come upon some Aboriginal women hunting possums. One was up a tree; another catching them as they dropped. She said something I did not understand, William later wrote in his memoirs, but gave me a kindly look that reassured me there was no danger. On looking up I saw another woman engaged in chopping a possum out of a branch.9 Many gold seekers were less sanguine about the Aboriginal presence than young William. Samuel Heape dismissed the Wathaurung as poor helpless things, while John James Bond was disgusted to hear the howling of the lubras as their affectionate husbands drag them by their hair, dance on them or knock them on the head with their tomahawks.10 Few settlers and sojourners were prepared to concede, as C. Rudston Read did in his published account of his sojourn on the goldfields in 1853, that white man has stepped in and taken possession of his land, nolens volens. Early visitor W. B. Griffith recorded a glossary of Wathaurung language. He transcribed the most common nouns: words for sun, moon, water, fire, no, yes, old man, young girl. And he collected a handful of verbs: to walk, to run, to come, to go away, to rest, to know. And pilmillally. To steal.
Settlers might have been loath to acknowledge the Wathaurung as property owners, but many were aware of the extensive quarrying, and subsequent commercial transactions, being carried out by Victorian Aboriginal people prior to and after British colonisation. Gold was among the minerals extracted by Aboriginal people, as Captain Cadell, explorer of the Murray River, noted when in 1857 he registered
a claim for the reward offered by the South Australian Government to discover a goldfield in that colony (in part to lure back its prodigal population). Cadell made his claim conjointly with a black woman, or lubra, known as Betsy, who has resided at Cape Willoughby…for 30 years.
It appears that the latter recently informed the captain on being shown some nuggets from Ballarat, that she had seen plenty of ‘dat yellow fellow tone’; and that when her son was a ‘piccaninny’ she, in company with another lubra, had beat out these stones, in her own words ‘made ’em long’.11
Aboriginal people’s superior knowledge of gold deposits, like their prior ownership of the land, was no secret.
Wathaurung people were initially bemused that white people would go to such frenzied lengths to take so much of the yellow fellow tone or medicine earth from the ground. After all, you couldn’t eat it, cut with it or use it to hunt. But they were also wise to the opportunities for their own commercial and social advantage presented by the European lust for gold. To the Indigenous locals, gold only became a ‘precious metal’ when it was clear that the newcomers were so desperate to find it. Object exchange formed the basis of kinship relations, which were the backbone of Indigenous social, political and economic organisation. Wathaurung brought the white newcomers into their circle of influence, a fact demonstrated in the following exchange between two women whose paths had suddenly collided:
My mother and wife and small boy that come out from England with us was standing at the tent one day all alone, no other tents near when they saw a mob of native Blacks and Lubrias [lubras] and a mob of dogs with them come across the gully so my wife said to Mother what ever will we do now so Mother said we must stand our ground and face them for there is no get away So up they come yabbering good day Missie. You my countary [country] woman now…the Blacks said You gotum needle missie you gotum thread you Gotum tea you Gotum sugar you Gotum Bacca [tobacco]. So Mother had to say yes to get rid of them and had to give them all they asked for to get rid of them. That was what was called the Bunyong [Buninyong] tribe and when they left they gave their usual salute. Goodbye missie and thankfull enough they was to see them disappear off into the bush.12