by Clare Wright
A year later, many of the original fugitives had returned, having either made their pile or realised there was now a more reliable and less backbreaking fortune to be made servicing the boatloads of immigrants being daily disgorged onto Melbourne’s shores. Carpenters, stonemasons and other artisans found their skills were suddenly at a premium. Dubious lawyers and uncertified doctors, who had come to Australia to dig for wealth, discovered that their professional practices were lucrative regardless of talent or qualification. A publican’s licence was a sure route to prosperity.
The social condition of the colony, and especially the city of Melbourne, wrote John Capper in his popular guidebook of 1854, becomes every day more complicated and unmanageable. Regulation of rents, prices, wages, sanitation and labour practices was a dream of the late nineteenth century’s progressive thinkers. In the early 1850s, the guiding principle was adaptation, not control. By November 1853, on the eve of their departure for Ballarat and over a year since Charles and George Evans had stepped off the boat, George amused himself with the array of ventures he and his equally educated brother had embarked upon:
Verily we have now got all the irons, poker, tongs and all: let me see, what are we? Confectioners, cooks, booksellers, dealers in cordials, fruiterers, lodging housekeepers, hay horners, storekeepers, carters, dealers in timber, et et et et
No one knew the value of adaptability better than women. What was needed in Victoria, far more than fine garments, letters of introduction and sterling protocols, wrote Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye in her advice manual for prospective female immigrants, is a smiling face, and a firm determination never to look on the shady side of the picture but to make the very best of every cross, accident or discomfort. There was no doubt that Melbourne was a pick-yourself-up, dust-yourself-off sort of a place.
It was also, thanks to the combination of dislocation and new money, a place of intoxicating experimentation. Commentators had endless fun describing the peculiarities of local dress. Diggers, draymen and labourers, reported Robert Caldwell, had adopted the ‘uniform’ of blue flannel shirt, brass-buckled belt, straw hat, knee-high boots and colourful neckchief. Large gold rings and flowing beards were also popular. It was a worker’s costume, but adopted by all walks of life as a symbol of colonial authenticity. William Kelly, who had been in California before arriving in Australia in 1853, observed that in Melbourne it was de rigueur to dispense with coats, gloves and bell-toppers, and that the scorecard on neckties vs. bare necks was fifty-fifty. Kelly also enjoyed describing the attire of Melbourne’s women who, he said, were addicted to flowers and corn-stalks worn in their bonnets. They also exhibited a passion for parasols (quite sensible, one would think, in the Australian sunshine). Warming to his topic, Kelly described how the gentler portion of the [female] community stayed indoors while the women who walked out in public were the strong-minded class…
striking but unattractive women [who] jostled you on the flagways, elbowed you in the shops, and rattled through the streets in carriages hired at a guinea an hour, arrayed in flaunting dresses of the most florid colours, composed of silks, sarcenets and brocaded satins.
For Kelly, the most amusing detail of all was what these promenading women wore on their feet. Dressed to kill, they buried their tiny feet and tapering ankles in lumbering Wellingtons.
The journalist Charles Lyall had another expression for the peculiarities of women’s dress in Victoria. The prevailing costume of the Ladies, he wrote, is the chacun a son gout style. The French phrase translates as ‘each to his own’, expressing individuality of taste or choice. John Capper put the strange antics of Melbourne’s women down to the fact that many of the young wives had never seen money before, hence the fashion for white satin, ostrich feathers and pearls, which they exhibited proudly while refreshing themselves with a pot of half-and-half. The women of Melbourne might have been lampooned for their gaucheries, but they relished the opportunity to experiment with unorthodox appearances. For those women who were proceeding to the diggings, such aesthetic adventures were good preparation for the journey ahead.
The explosion in Melbourne’s growth had far-reaching effects, and many immigrants, particularly those with families, were disheartened by what they saw when they left the relative security of their ship. The search for decent lodgings was the first challenge. Single young men like the Calwells could bed down in any nook or cranny, but fathers struggled to find accommodation for their dependants. Solomon Belinfante, a Jamaican-born London Jew of Portuguese Sephardic ancestry, arrived on the luxurious Queen of the South in June 1854, the same journey that brought Governor La Trobe’s replacement, Sir Charles Hotham, to his new home. Solomon had been assured a room in Melbourne by one of his brethren. He went ashore with his pregnant, twenty-one-year-old, Jamaican-born wife Ada, their infant daughter Rebecca and her nursemaid, after a comfortable seventy-eight days at sea under steam power. We had lunch in a miserable place called Sandridge, wrote Belinfante, aged forty, in his diary, then walked to the omnibus ankle deep in mud…heartily sick of the Cohen promises to engage lodgings…heartily disgusted with the place. Ada and Solomon soon settled in Collingwood, where he became a commercial broker and she got on with the business of having eleven more children.3
Genteel Martha Clendinning had a similarly tough time of finding lodgings. Thirty-two-year-old Martha was a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, raised in Kings County. As a daughter of the Protestant Ascendancy class, it was fitting that she married a doctor sixteen years her senior. By the time Martha and her husband, George, arrived in Melbourne, they had already endured a long and monotonous voyage from England that ended in a calamitous shipwreck in Port Phillip Bay, just off Queenscliff. All the steerage passengers lost their entire belongings in the hold and lower deck, but the Clendinnings, in a first-class berth, got off lightly. They did lose their digging tools and almost lost their tent, which later became their Ballarat home for two years. But in Melbourne, Martha, her seven-year-old daughter, Margaret, and her sister, Sarah Lloyd, eventually found a room to rent—also in Collingwood—in the house of the well known vocalist, Mrs Tester. George Clendinning and Sarah’s husband stayed at a pub, sleeping atop a billiard table.
At this stage, the suburb of Collingwood had no roads and the stumps of newly felled gum trees poked out of the ground. A four-foot-high gum stub protruded right at the entrance to the doctor’s wife’s new abode. Martha marvelled at the happy-go-lucky spirit of her young daughter who remained free from all the anxieties and fears for the future that pressed on her parents. The girl was perfectly happy, wrote Martha in her memoirs, and enjoyed all the changes and chances we had passed through. She probably slept well at night, too, unlike Martha, who found sleep impossible. It wasn’t just apprehension that kept her awake; her restlessness was also owing to the crowds of mosquitoes that attacked us. Everyone complained about the mosquitos. Some newcomers reacted so badly to the insects’ stings that they had to be hospitalised. And when they were not being monstered by mosquitos, neophyte Victorians were driven mad by flies.4
But if insects were irritating, there was a more menacing scourge. Colonial fever was a quaint name for a hideous disease: typhus, spread by head lice, and characterised by headaches, chills and the foul smell of rotting bodily fluids. It was sometimes known as putrid fever. Colonial fever was exacerbated by overcrowding and poor hygiene. It took out young and old, hearty and sickly alike, and it frightened even the Pollyannas among the immigrants. Women were known to shave their pubic hair to diminish the chances of lice infestation. To add to the lethal mix, influenza, scarlet fever, measles, tuberculosis and whooping cough all became endemic in Victoria in the 1850s, associated with high immigration, high birth rate and congested living conditions.
The housing shortage underlay many of Melbourne’s social woes. Real estate prices had dropped in Melbourne when the town was emptied following the first gold discoveries, but now the rush was on to accommodate the daily delivery of new souls. All manner of temp
orary structures were erected to serve as lodging houses; so much the better if you could get a liquor licence and call it a hotel. Not surprisingly, disease spread like wildfire through these unsanitary and overcrowded hostelries. In 1854, the Legislative Council took action and passed the Act for the Well-Ordering of Common Lodging Houses, which required landlords and their houses to be registered and inspected for cleanliness and ventilation. The latter was theoretically easy in a wide-open country. The former was virtually impossible in a city that would not get a sewerage system until the 1890s. Lodging houses were also supposed to keep the unmarried sexes segregated. Like the ships captains, on this score the city fathers were truly beating against the wind.
Frances and Thomas Pierson could find neither a lodging house nor a hotel room. After debarking from the Ascutna, they pitched a tent on the beach at Sandridge. Hundreds more were doing the same thing. The beach was reduced to a campsite hugging the shore. One day soon after the Piersons’ arrival, a hideous summer gale blew a hurricane for fourteen hours without reprieve. The sand flew in clouds thicker than I ever saw it snow, wrote Thomas. The sand stuck to the perspiration that dripped from their exposed skin. All our faces was so black, Thomas spat, you actually could not tell a black man from a white one. It took the Piersons two months to locate their more permanent accommodation in Collingwood. Thomas’s antipathy did not abate with a roof over his head. Frances was too unwell, suffering from the debilitating dysentery that racked new arrivals. After witnessing several neighbours die of colonial fever, he wrote in his diary, This is a very unhealthy place—all a Lie that we were told in History or the papers. Thomas Pierson was scared for his wife’s declining health and felt mightily ripped off. He was not reserving judgment on Australia: This is the most God forsaken accursed country I could conceive of.
Even more desolate for some: those too poor or unlucky to find accommodation were left with one grim place of last resort. Canvas Town was a tent city, authorised by Governor La Trobe in 1852 as a salve for the housing crisis, located on the south side of the Yarra River at Emerald Hill (now the site of the Melbourne Arts Centre). Like the township of Melbourne itself, Canvas Town was laid out in an orderly grid. Interspersed with tent dwellings were tent stores, bakers shops, butchers stalls, restaurants, sly grog shops and barbers shops. Inhabitants paid five shillings for a plot.
It sounds like a fine solution, but the way of life for its eight thousand inhabitants was anything but idyllic. The MARCO POLO CHRONICLE had warned immigrants about Canvas Town, the epitome of misery and costliness. The land here was unforgiving: boggy in winter, baked dry in summer. The only available water supply was the foetid Yarra River, downstream of the tanneries and soap factories of Collingwood and Richmond. Colonial fever, dysentery and crime were rife.
Martha Clendinning paid a ghoulish visit to Canvas Town one day, perhaps lured by what Charles Dickens called the ‘attraction of repulsion’. The begrimed and unrecognisable children who roamed about in packs, dodging and weaving carts that were loaded with firewood, rumbling between the tents with their wretched occupants, horrified Martha. Everyone and everything was covered in dust. Henry Mundy provided the soundtrack: children squalling, women shrieking and men shouting, the noise was uproarious.
There may have been mud, filth, flies, teeming accommodation, gaudy dresses, drunken revellers, exorbitant prices, ominous diseases and absent husbands, but we should not confuse this bedlam with Hollywood’s version of the Wild West. There is a significant difference. Melbourne was a far-flung but loyal satellite of the British Empire, built by and upon British institutions. By 1854, Melbourne already had a public library and a university. Within thirty years, it would become an exemplary international metropolis. And in the imperial metropolis, unlike Dodge City, one expected to be governed—and governed judiciously.
On the American frontier, Judge Lynch was the only paternal figure, and Darwinian logic—the survival of the physically and spiritually fittest—was remorseless. During the Californian gold rush, the ideology of order was based on the morality of the individual rather than the institutions established by the ruling elite: individual honour counted for more than an externally imposed social order. By contrast, British citizens expected to be governed by the organisations and ethos of British justice. As the MARCO POLO CHRONICLE reassured its readers, the Genuine Spirit of British Generosity, Nobility and Earnestness exists in the brave young city. They would not need to fend for themselves; the mother country had their back.
But prevailing British social mores would be tested. Tent living didn’t only let the dust in. Like a sea voyage, mass camping brought unexpected, and potentially uninvited, familiarity. William Kelly described an indelicate drawback of tent living: if your candle at bedtime happened to be extinguished first, you might probably be startled by the shadowy phantom of Mrs or Miss A B C, next door, in her night-dress, preparing for the stretcher. There’s a certain ribald piquancy to Kelly’s sketch, but the fact is that camping life, like ship life, made for a community of intimate strangers.
Boundaries were as steadfast as the flicker of candlelight. In this, the material conditions of living reflected the metaphysical aspect of social change. One female sojourner wrote that Australian conventions were quite an elastic, compressible thing, and give to the touch like anything. William Westgarth reflected that such flexibility could catch a fellow off guard; over-weening aspiration lurked in the shadows and threatened customary notions of decency. Ambition, he observed, writing about the gold rush population, may rear its head from any social grade, unchecked by conventional barriers. It’s no wonder that colonial anxiety did not turn on how to employ or house the restless throng daily washing up on the colony’s shores, but rather on how to restrain this ‘downside up community’.5
All a lie, thundered Thomas Pierson. He was merely committing to his diary what many people discussed over tea and damper. The crashing discord between expectation and reality quickly became apparent to most immigrants. Just think of those three months or more at sea. It’s a long time to defer gratification. To stare at the horizon with only the wide-open future ahead. All those promises of prosperity—milk and honey and manly self-regard—conjured up at will to crowd out the oceanic stench of vomit, piss, maggots and death. And then, finally, you’re there. Thomas Pierson was not the only new arrival with a gnawing sense that he’d been hoodwinked. And Martha Clendinning was but one of many chroniclers who spoke of their intense anxiety.
Anxiety, as today’s psychiatrists will tell you, can be a symptom of the dissonance between two fundamental states of being: a clash between inner conception and outer manifestation, or between the idealised and the actual. Could we diagnose a mass emotional decompensation among Victoria’s immigrants? Commentators certainly evoked the language of disease to describe the social pathology created by the cascade of gold rushes. The yellow fever, it was called. Melbourne is a dreadful place, wrote Henry Mundy, everybody seems to be going mad either with too much money or too little. The entire colony was infected, according to John Capper: the gold fever raged here more generally and more violently than in New South Wales.
George Evans analysed the root of the malady: poor fellows who went up [to the diggings] with bright hopes and golden dreams are coming down with empty pockets and desponding hearts. George Francis Train was apt to agree, despite the fact that he was well on his way to establishing one of Melbourne’s most successful trading houses. Lying reports. Yes—I repeat, lying reports, Train wrote on 7 November 1853, lying reports that went home from Melbourne and Sydney…reports made to catch the eye of every adventurer. Train believed that the reports were planted by parties interested in land and sales commissions, then echoed by newspapers with an eye to their own profits. After six months in the colony, Train had decided that Victoria was not the Southern El Dorado, but the South Sea Bubble. I know of no instance in commercial history, he railed, when so large a business has been transacted without any reliable information.
Thomas Pierson also thought it was people with interests who trafficked in false hope; he fingered the shipowners—and merchants like G. F. Train.
Not everyone experienced their internal ructions as maddening. Willie Davis Train, a southern belle plucked from the plantation, might have been expecting to find life in the South Sea Bubble arduous. But after a year in Melbourne, she wrote in a long letter to her father, Colonel George Davis, a friend of Abraham Lincoln: The extraordinary change which has been effected in Melbourne within the past year can scarcely be credited by those who have not like myself witnessed the wonderful revolution. For Willie, the external pace of change had swept through her like a tonic, tempering her grief at losing her only child just weeks before sailing. As I advance in years and experience, she wrote to her brother on the same day, I find myself undergoing such a wonderful revolution that at times I marvel at my own thoughts.
An inner riot; a symbiotic uprising of spirit and circumstance. Willie’s only misgiving was the amount of time George spent at work, absorbed in business, building a new stone warehouse or clinching another deal. He was also infamous for occupying a personal chair in gin-slinging at the Criterion Hotel in Collins Street, run by American proprietor Sam Moss. I rarely see him, she confided, but must I suppose make no complaints. Willie would have known she was one of the lucky ones. For the majority of newcomers, even other well-heeled ladies of fine breeding and education, it was a struggle just to keep a toehold in an avalanche of adversity.