by Clare Wright
Catherine Sherwin was another Irish lass on the move, but her momentum drew on a different sense of exclusion. Catherine was born in 1831 in County Sligo, Ireland. Sligo is famed for its mountainous Atlantic coastline, its favourite son W.B. Yeats and its massive rates of emigration; almost half of the County’s population sailed from its renowned port between 1850 and the end of the nineteenth century. The Sherwin family was among the one per cent of Sligo’s Protestant population. Literate and ambitious, Catherine would soon discover that, as the prosperous Mrs Catherine Bentley, it was not so easy to leave her deeply ingrained outlier status behind.
English teacher and historian James Bonwick, who arrived in Australia in 1841, recognised that the disaffected and dispossessed of Europe would not readily check their grievances at the door:
Amongst the immigrants who were day after day pouring in from every quarter, there was no doubt many a chartist, many a democrat, escaped from the thralldom of aristocratic England, many a refugee and exile from the continent of Europe, who came in search not only of gold but of a refuge from the soul-and-body-grinding despotism of Europe.
The revolutions ripping at the fabric of Europe were not seamlessly elided in Victoria; rather, the ideas, aspirations and language of the old world seeped into the porous new cultural and political landscape. Seen from this angle, the Victorian gold rush doesn’t represent a new dawn in Australia’s young history so much as the long dusk of Europe’s age of revolutions. Travelling south, the gold rush immigrants were sailing neither into nor away from the sunset. It would be their fate to be forever caught between old world antagonisms and new world expectations.
It was impossible not to have great expectations. The pull towards Victoria was overwhelming, the allure fervently communicated by the first arrivals of late 1851 and early 1852. These men and women sent heartfelt letters home to family members, wrote correspondents’ reports for newspapers and published literary accounts of their travels. The WILTS AND GLOUCESTERSHIRE STANDARD regularly published letters from successful emigrants. One ‘Elizabeth’ had written to her mother: I hope that all my brothers and sisters that are eligible for a free passage will apply immediately and be sure to apply as farm servants or dairymaids and they will be certain of a free passage to this our adopted country, the land of plenty.4
The ‘land of plenty’ allegory is a common theme in these early reports. Victoria was the Promised Land and Ballarat, a Christian emigration society confidently announced in its promotional literature, is the Ararat on which the ark of Victoria rested, and saved the colony. Seventeen-year-old Scotsman Alexander Dick sought a new, free and better life and deliverance from what I regarded as servile bondage. Fanny Davis, an assisted immigrant from England, thought that as her ship prepared to depart: We must have looked very much like the Children of Israel going out of Egypt.5
Indeed, Fanny’s reference to Exodus 3:1—God’s decree to Moses to lead his people away out of affliction into the land flowing with milk and honey—explains a great deal about the aspirations of those immigrants in flight. The impending journey to Victoria was not simply about the lust for gold. The gold seekers were not sinners, but innocents abroad. Dreamers. Visionaries. Refugees. Like Alexander Dick, they sought deliverance.
The story of Victoria’s gold dovetailed perfectly with the global liberation narrative that expressed the spirit of the times. If repression was the lock, gold was the key.
The picture painted of Victoria worldwide was as a land paved with gold, a yellow brick road to unlimited opportunity. Newspapers around the globe printed endless statements of gold returns, enumerating the breathtaking value of the gold in private hands, Melbourne banks and diggers’ pockets. On 8 April 1852, the London TIMES reported the astonishing results achieved over the past three months: £730,242 worth of gold and where it is to end no human being can guess. The field is reported to be illimitable. This correspondent pressed readers to hurry to the land where boundless plenty smiles side by side with countless wealth. Just three months later, the total value of gold thus far found in Victoria was £1,647,810.
The promise of instant wealth is perennially attractive—as the vice-like grip of poker machines and lotteries on the pockets of today’s punters still demonstrates—but how much more compelling when there are eye-witnesses to the Midas miracle:
[Gold] lies on the surface and after a shower of rain, you may see it with the naked eye, and a child can put in a spade, and dig that with his little hands in one minute, which many of you in England wear out eyes and heart in getting.
That’s how MURRAY’S GUIDE TO THE GOLD DIGGINGS, published in London in 1852, depicted the situation on the ground. Gold digging was simply child’s play.
MURRAY’S GUIDE drew on a series of anecdotes to present a true account for prospective diggers. Like other guidebooks that promoted the attractions of the goldfields—the healthy air, beautiful scenery and the glow of animal enjoyment peculiar to bush life—MURRAY’S particularly encouraged fathers of large families to come, sowing the seed of aspiration in those husbands who, perhaps, had failed to bring home sufficient bacon in Manchester, Edinburgh or Cardiff. It was a well-publicised image: the victorious father arriving back in the mother country to a grateful wife and adoring children waiting patiently by the hearth.
According to John Capper, a man’s children were, in England, dead weights around his progress, but a true blessing in Australia. Digger-turned-merchant Robert Caldwell agreed. I enjoy the satisfaction of providing well for my family through my own exertions, he wrote in his reminiscences, a satisfaction I could never have felt in England.
By late 1854, the time young William McLeish’s family made the decision to try their luck in Victoria, British households were also suffering the material and psychological effects of the Crimean War. Many of the working class found it a hard matter to obtain regular employment, recalled William. Though the departing McLeish family was surrounded by weeping friends who all believed they were bidding us a final good-bye, which indeed they were, the promised restoration of masculine pride through honest toil beckoned like the Pied Piper.
Notions of ‘manliness’ were linked to another important incentive to gold seeking: independence. In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, manliness was a racialised concept imbued with assumptions about the civility of true British manhood, as against the brute stupidity or innate slovenliness of lesser beings.6 For the labouring class, manliness was predicated on improving one’s situation in life, and rested largely on the ability to become self-employed, and eventually self-made.
It is thus not surprising that the guarantee of autonomy resonates persistently in the letters of new immigrants to the family and neighbours they’d left behind. James Green conveyed this sentiment in a note to his sister, written on 24 July 1853, that answered her enquiry as to whether their brother George should also ‘come out’. Come here by all means, entreated James; a few years here and he would be an independent man, he is very simple if he stops at home digging potatoes when he might come here and dig gold.
Robert Caldwell similarly emphasised the perfect freedom and thorough independence of a gold digger’s life, particularly for the youth of energy, adventure and courage. Samuel Mossman evoked the image of a poor labourer and his family huddled around the embers of a miserable fire, surviving a northern winter, unable to improve his living conditions. In Australia, by contrast, there was no snow and fuel was cheap and abundant. It’s the poor man’s country, Mossman declared, what independence would surround them! In Australia want and penury is unknown, daylight and darkness, heat and cold, are more equally distributed throughout the seasons. Mossman steered clear of biblical allusion but referenced other mythological tales. Many Britons came to Australia as sickly and downcast, he argued, but under the bright southern sun and wholesome air the weak man rallied. With health and strength before him, like a young Hercules, he commences the world anew.
Images of heroic self-sufficiency reinforced the image of bou
ndless personal space, both physical and psychic, to be found in Victoria. I don’t think I could breathe there now, said one Englishman of his motherland, it’s always—you must do this, or you must not do that…it would fairly drive me mad.7
The abolitionist movement had successfully campaigned to end slavery in the British Empire in 1833. Now a new generation was proclaiming that this was a time for white men to break free of their bonds, whether to exploitative employers, irksome family or a tyrannical state. The land they are going to is neither formal nor exclusive, wrote one booster, working men need no introduction beyond industry and aptitude. Employers take no account of pedigree.
For a man beaten down by generations of class consciousness, this chance to stand tall and proud, regardless of the cut of his cloth, seemed nothing short of redemptive. Australia may well be considered the Paradise of Working Men, struggling fathers and superfluous sons were told. The Sweat of the brow—the timeworn badge of labour—bears with it no stamp of servitude, and to the patient worker success is no problem. For all willing hands there is labour, and for all labour there is liberal reward.8
Historian David Goodman, in his classic comparative study of gold digging in Victoria and California, has persuasively elucidated what he calls the ‘colonial narrative’—the story that contemporaries told about the effects of gold on society. One of the most significant elements of this story, Goodman argues, was ‘the depiction of the human relationship to the environment as one of struggle and conquest, a relationship which allowed scope for masculine heroism’. Goodman understands the colonial narrative as ‘a male story’ because men’s triumph over their circumstances—material and social—tapped into an atavistic desire for mastery.
But could this idea have appeal for women also? Did it have a particular appeal? This letter from Lucy Hart, written to her mother in England in May 1852, illustrates that autonomy was highly prized by women, too.
I would not come back to England again unless I had enough to keep me without work on no account. Neither would my husband. I am speaking now the very sentiments of our hearts, but people must be saving, industrious and persevering. We have deprived ourselves of many things we might have had, but what was it for? All to try to do something for ourselves so that my husband should not always work under a Master, and happy I am to inform you that we have gained that point, he is now his own master.
Lucy’s letter, like most personal correspondence and ship journals, would have been read out aloud at gatherings and passed around among family members, friends and acquaintances.9 It would have become precious cultural capital, impressing other women with its pungent whiff of satisfaction, almost defiance. Its message: wives in Victoria could enjoy the ancillary benefits of a proud, upright husband and mutual reward for family labours.
But it’s also clear that women were promoting the advantages of autonomy for their own personal fulfilment. May Howell wrote ardently of life at the diggings:
I dare say it is an independent life, trusting to yourself, putting forth all your energy, no leaning on others, no one to control, or dictate to you, going where you like, doing what you like, no relation laying down the law, and chalking out your path in life.
Forty-two-year-old Mary Spencer, sailing on the Arabian, felt no ambivalence or anxiety as she looked back over her shoulder at the receding shore of her homeland. As her ship diary reveals, she saw only the miraculous prospect of liberation from suffocating drawing rooms and the endless minutiae of genteel etiquette. Mary revelled in the starry nights on deck with everyone happy, no jarring world of cares to disturb us. Her only woe was that there was so little to write about: happiness is quiet and uninteresting in its detail. For both men and women, the heady assumption of self-governance would come to have major socio-political implications once they reached the diggings.
MURRAY’S GUIDE held another prophetic image. This one relied on neither the promise of male breadwinning nor the intoxication of personal liberation. It involved the companionable mutuality of young husbands and wives making a new start together. This vision encouraged women to become the driving force behind emigration. Wives should not allow their husbands to go without them if they have passage money for both was the message, an inducement for women to assert command over proceedings. Other commentators exhorted women to come to the goldfields to act as a stimulant to many fathers’ yearning heart in this motley multitude. Women, declared the ILLUSTRATED AUSTRALIAN MAGAZINE of September 1851, would give a dash of humanity to the broad outline of savageism [sic] that emerges when men congregate in sexual isolation.
The concept of women as civilising agents is endemic to transnational colonial history. According to this ideology, women are seen as agents of conservative restoration, bringing virtue to rough-and-ready frontier outposts. These angels of the imperial hearth would fulfil their ‘natural’ role in sweeping aside the detritus of frontier living, taming men with wholesome marriages, bearing children to send to nascent schools, and holding together a moral universe in which charity and benevolence would smooth the jagged edges of corruption and greed.
Nonconformist teacher and historian James Bonwick was chief proselytiser of the ‘God’s Police’ archetype on the goldfields. It’s a paradigm he laid out in his AUSTRALIAN GOLD DIGGER’S MONTHLY MAGAZINE AND COLONIAL FAMILY VISITOR, a magazine that ran from October 1852 to May 1853, sold in Melbourne and on the diggings, and sent back to be shared among family members and friends. To Bonwick, Victoria’s golden gullies were the gift of a God of gracious Providence and he erected a special pedestal for women in his idealised rural scene. Bonwick wrote of the sources of satisfaction that awaited women who, with their husbands, set up happy, virtuous homes of honest toil. In the edition for February 1853, Bonwick described a pleasant weekend visit to Ballarat, where no gold district has been so eminently rich as Eureka.
At no other diggings [was I] so struck with its order, propriety and comfort…The Sunday was strictly observed. A few parasols, veils and private arm-in-arm couples were encountered on our ramble. Many domestic scenes gave us a lively pleasure; as, the digger nursing his little babe, a mother reading to her children, family groups beneath bough porches, a roguish, tiny fellow pouring water into a plate for his puppy, a girl enticing a cow to be milked, with divers polka-jackets flitting to and fro in household duty.
It’s not exactly Dodge City. Bonwick here imposes a pastoral idyll that historian Graeme Davison has called the heart of England, a rhapsodic place of cultivated farmlands and compliant social relations.10 This is the antithesis of Dickensian London, with its crowded streets, hungry waifs, toothless crones and worn-out factory fodder. But it’s not the American Wild West either—all knife fights, saloon whores and lawless degeneracy. No, Bonwick’s new frontier is the staging post of wholesome women, whose presence is the harbinger, not only of comfort, but of moral progress.
Was Bonwick aware of any contradiction between this smug polka-dotted duty and May Howell’s vision of independence? The English rural idyll would prove to have little in common with Victoria’s sunburnt hinterland, and even less relevance to its early intake of remarkably recalcitrant ladies.
It was not only pious ideologues who were promoting the advantages of female immigration to the goldfields. In September 1854, immigration agent Edward Bell reported to the colonial government on the success of its own recruitment drive:
It will be gratifying to your Excellency to remark, that the recommendation of the late Lieutenant Governor, Mr La Trobe, that a large number of females should be imported in order to check the manifest disproportion in the sexes, consequent on the enormous addition to the male population which resulted from the opening of the Gold Fields in 1851, have been carefully attended by Her Majesty’s Commissioners; and that the number of women, female children, and infants introduced, nearly doubles the number of males. The introduction of single men, except grown sons in large families, has been abandoned.
Bell’s returns for 1853 reveal that 9
342 females (of all ages) received assisted passage, compared to 5236 males. (By contrast, of the 77,734 unassisted passengers, 54,800 were adult men and 12,277 were adult women. The rest were children more or less equally spread between the sexes.) Demographic studies by historians have shown that this unprecedented pool of female government emigrants was largely drawn from small-farm and small-town environments, where extensive recruiting was carried out for young single women. A disproportionate number came from Ireland: between 1848 and 1860, fifty-one per cent of single immigrant women to Victoria were Irish.11 English and Scottish girls proved more reluctant to leave established family circles and stable domestic service arrangements.
Much depended on the girl’s place in the family. If an older (or younger) sister could stay behind to look after aging parents, then a spare daughter might see herself free. Some, like the letter-writer ‘Elizabeth’, became the family or village scout, judging the prospects before encouraging other siblings, aunts, cousins and neighbours to apply for passage. One lucky girl, who found work on an outstation near Geelong as a well-remunerated wet-nurse, wrote to her family: I wish you were all here, there is room for you all, and wages too. By such entreaties the process of chain migration began. Such refugees from the depressed economic and social landscape of Great Britain had no intention of making a return voyage.
Letters such as this one often ended up in the guidebooks for immigrants to Victoria that were a publishing phenomenon after 1852. These books recorded base wages for all grades of domestic servant and labourer, information on what to bring to the colony (mattress, bolster, blankets; knife, fork and mug) and, for single women, assessments of the marriage market. Of the roughly 7000 adult women who came as assisted emigrants in 1853, 4500 were single and 2500 were married. The average family size among the married emigrants was 1.5 children, which indicates the youth of the new arrivals: it was not uncommon for women of the time to bear seven or more children. A surprisingly large proportion was literate; only 2500 could neither read nor write, and this category included children and infants. (Even Edward Bell remarked on the unprecedented level of schooling among assisted emigrants.) Women were, clearly, making educated choices. The guidebooks, like the English journals of the time, were full of the scarcity of wives and excellent matches sure to be made in Australia, where happy prosperous homes could be created to erase the memory of lives of struggling adversity at home. The worst emigrants, all agreed, were those genteel paupers with little money and much pride. This for the simple reason that the wealth of a colonist lies in work. Similarly, young unmarried women intending to be brides but with no experience of working were advised to stay put: