by Clare Wright
Martha and Sarah conveyed their joyous plan to their husbands. The men greeted the proposal with peals of laughter. They’d be the laughing stock of the diggers, they said. What did a couple of women know of business, they said. You’ll be cheated and mocked, they said. So Martha and Sarah said tosh! We were disgusted at the reception, remembered Martha years later. The sisters kept to their plan, even amid the derision of their husbands, who maintained a quiet sense of our excessive folly. What George did not realise was that moonlighting to support their husbands was commonplace among Ballarat wives. Being financially dependent on his wife was just one more way in which The Doctor was about to become an ordinary digger.
By January 1854, the Ballarat goldfields rattled with industry and hummed with domesticity. The public and private spheres—whose separation was such a Victorian-era ideal—were as permeable here as a candlelit tent. Summer was in full flight, taking its toll on a community that lived in, by and for the elements. A tremendous blow of hot wind blew down to pieces a great many tents, wrote Thomas Pierson on 5 January. Living in those flailing tents were 6650 women, 2150 children and 10,700 men—almost twenty thousand inhabitants. Though Castlemaine and Sandhurst (Bendigo) maintained greater populations in the summer of 1853 (21,225 and 26,500 respectively), Ballarat had the highest proportion of women: forty-five per cent of Ballarat’s inhabitants were women and children, compared with twenty-three per cent at Castlemaine and thirty-one per cent at Bendigo. Even these latter percentages are a far cry from William Withers’ depiction of the womanless crowds of the first year of the gold rush. Of the overall goldfields population of 80,000 in January 1854, one in every three people was a woman or child.1 In Ballarat in 1854, gold digging was inextricable from breadwinning.
Newcomers to the diggings knew to expect that women and children would be there in numbers. You only had to open your eyes. The Ballarat correspondent to the GEELONG ADVERTISER wrote on 25 July 1854 of the romance of the old days when the only amusement to be derived was from gazing at tall stringy-barks. Now, he wrote, it refreshes one to look back on a time when the black police kept watch and ward over adventurous ladies who had come to see the diggings, and whose arrival on the old Golden Point was greeted with a three times three. These days, he sighed, the coach brings up its hundreds of the fair sex, and not a solitary cheer greets its arrival.
One fellow wrote home in late 1853 that there are not less than 20,000 men gold digging, besides women and children, all of whom two months ago were in Melbourne or Geelong. The correspondent’s next comment was probably more fanciful than observational. The diggers are clothing their wives and children in silks and satins, he wrote.2 The image of heroic husbandry, as we have seen, was a central symbol in the gold rush iconography. Chivalrous benefactors were supposed to be the saviours of the day.
But when William Howitt visited the goldfields in 1854, the damsels did not appear to be distressed. There are some hugely fat women on the diggings, he wrote, the life seems to suit them. They seemed to enjoy the outdoor existence, adapting to its conditions. The women were not swathed in finery, but rather dressed in a fashion that suited a life of toil. A wide awake hat, neat fitting jacket, handsome dress, observed Howitt; a costume quite made for the diggings. It needed to be. In the mornings, Howitt saw women and girls hanging out the wash, cooking over campfires and chopping wood with great axes which swung them. They kept chickens and goats. These diggeresses, he concluded, provided a certain stationary substratum beneath the fluctuating surface. Women had quietly become the bedrock of the Victorian mining communities.
Englishman William Kelly, who had previously written books about the Californian goldfields before touring Australia in 1853 and 1858, noted that a remarkable feature of the Ballarat diggings was the large proportion of women. American research reveals that only three per cent to ten per cent of the ‘forty-niners’ were female, clearly a much smaller proportion than in Victoria.3 (In California women’s presence on the goldfields was greeted with hostility by men, who believed that women foretold an end to male camaraderie. There was a common axiom: when the women and Jews arrived, it spelled the end of the good old days.4) If the Californian diggings weren’t an exclusively masculine terrain, men were certainly a more predominant force than in Victoria, and this would have important implications for the respective political destinies of the two frontier outposts.
Kelly noted the upside of this female presence in Ballarat. The Californian digger had to roast, grind and boil his own coffee, he wrote, but the Victorian, who is surrounded with women, would be saved all that bother. It’s tempting to leave the quote there but the rest of the passage reveals his true opinion:
I was on the point of writing the softer sex, but that would have been a misnomer for the most callous specimens of the female creation I ever encountered were mere green pulp in comparison with some of the granite-grained viragoes I had the honour of meeting in the ‘field of cloth of gold’ in the new world.
Kelly preferred the dewy maidens of the old country, with their acquiescent airs and compliant graces; his expectations of what women’s presence on the fields should mean were constantly dashed. Other observers also felt compelled to mention that the average diggeress did not long retain the aspect of an English rose. Howitt commented that lovely, blooming maidens soon withered under the influence of the Australian climate. Their physical elasticity was impaired and they became lamentably susceptible to the encroachments of agedness. (Kelly recommended that men marry greatly below their age, which was common enough without his counsel.) As the bounds of their physical and interpersonal worlds stretched, as they mapped new social and economic terrain, so women’s skin wizened like winter apples. If their shipboard sunburn had signalled a radical inversion for female immigrants—the exchange of safety and seclusion for earthly experience—the terms of the deal were written on their bodies. It was a trade-off that many women were pleased to make.
Right from the start, the idea that the goldfields would be worked by honest British yeomen and their cream-skinned wives was seared into the public imagination. James Bonwick was the ideologue-in-chief with his AUSTRALIAN GOLD DIGGER’S MONTHLY MAGAZINE AND COLONIAL FAMILY VISITOR, first published in October 1852. This little magazine will be the connecting link between the goldfields and the cottage home, Bonwick wrote in the inaugural edition. In stark contrast to the Californian diggings, which had no laws in place, no police force and no regulatory institutions (since California did not become a state of the Union until September 1850, after the Mexican-American war), Victoria was British to its bootstraps. This golden region shall be a peaceful home for the gathering of nations, promised Bonwick. Not the manifest destiny of mighty rivers and endless fertile plains, but the humble provision of an orderly abode.
The Bonwicks of the age were in no doubt about the importance of women in creating the micro households that would agglomerate to the macro colonial domicile. No persons are so interested in the order and security of the diggings as the wives of diggers up there, wrote Bonwick in February 1853. The prevailing notion of women as civilising agents—tamers of men’s wilder passions, harbingers of righteous integrity, John Ruskin’s famed ‘angels of the hearth’—underpinned the acceptance, and indeed encouragement, of women on the diggings. According to this ideal, women would be agents of conservative restoration, reinstating the social mores, and helping to establish the social institutions, of a settled colonial outpost. These ministering angels of the imperial heath would sweep aside the detritus of frontier living, housetraining men in wholesome marriages, bearing children to send to nascent schools: holding up a moral universe in which charity and benevolence would smooth the jagged edges of greed and corruption. That was the idea, anyway.
But it was not just ideology that wove women into the fabric of goldfields society. In the hard-nosed way of British bureaucracy, there were structural provisions made for the reality that women would be integral to the colonial economy. The emblem of the Victorian d
omestic idyll could be not just a soother of furrowed brows, but a source of revenue too. From the first proclamation of the Gold Regulations for Victoria’s auriferous regions in September 1851, women acquired a unique legal identity. They were able, indeed compelled, to take out a licence to work on the diggings. As such, women were technically afforded the political legitimacy that is the inalienable right of the property owner in a capitalist regime.
This is how the Gold Regulations worked. The administrative model adopted by La Trobe’s government asserted the prerogative of the Crown over all minerals extracted from Crown land. A licence fee of 30 shillings per month was instituted, entitling individual miners to a claim of twelve feet by twelve and the right to take wood and water from the land. Commissioners were appointed to collect the fee, check licences and resolve disputes arising from mining claims.
From the very beginning the licence system was unpopular and unmanageable. With a few exceptions (for ministers of religion, pastoral lease holders, servants) it amounted to a capitation tax; in effect, every person resident on the diggings was required to pay the fee regardless of their success in finding gold. The licence fee was a poll tax, not an income tax—and it was as detested as any poll tax has ever been in the history of the Exchequer.
Because so many of the heads to be taxed rested on the shoulders of women and children, an exemption clause was written into the regulations. The Gold Regulations stated that All females not mining or trading and children under fourteen years of age who shall only reside but not mine any Gold Field did not need to carry a licence nor apply to the commissioners for an ‘exception ticket’. By implication, women who did mine or trade would need to take out their own licence in their own name. It is impossible to ascertain exactly how many women were issued with mining licences, for the gold commissioners’ licensing registers no longer exist. The nineteenth-century laws of coverture would normally have meant that a woman’s legal identity was literally cloaked by her husband’s, but colonial exigencies required the government to take a flexible approach. The only miners and traders on the goldfields who do appear to have been genuinely exempt from licence holding were the Wathaurung.
In principle, then, anyone could access the mineral resource—even women and children—for a flat fee. This levelling approach had an important consequence: broadening the tax base increased the number of people with a stake in Victoria’s fundamentally undemocratic and centralised system of government. Even female licence holders expected a modicum of representation for their taxation—as dramatic events would later demonstrate.
It wasn’t just digging up the Crown’s glittering soil that attracted a fee. All persons resident upon the goldfields in the practice of a profession, trade or calling, of any permitted kind were required to contribute to the public purse. Storekeepers were charged the weighty fee of £15 for a three-month licence to run their business. This charge was just as unpopular as the mining fee, for there was no infrastructure provided in exchange for the revenue, simply the right of occupation, and most stores in 1854 amounted to little more than a family tent with two chambers: one for sleeping in and one for trading out of. When Martha Clendinning purchased a licence for her store, she complained that she had to pay a standard £40 a year quite irrespective of its size and business capacity. My little one was rated the same as the largest in the Main Road. Just as petitions and demonstrations were mounted against the hated licence tax from 1852 onwards, so storekeepers rallied against the iniquitous conditions of their legal tenure. Hawkers, it was pointed out, did not require a licence; the fact that most itinerant salesmen were Jews did not help. For its part, the government refused to acknowledge that the licence fee for mining or storekeeping was a tax at all, arguing that the amount of advantage to be drawn from the privilege of occupying Crown land amply compensated for the loss.5
Bringing miners, shopkeepers and other professionals under the same regulatory rubric produced an interesting result. All goldfields inhabitants were effectively defined as small business people, creating a single category of commercial identity. This one-size-fits-all system would contribute to the famous egalitarianism of the goldfields where, as the balladeer Charles Thatcher sang to packed crowds in the theatres of Ballarat and Bendigo, we’re all upon a level. And because women became central to the economy of the goldfields, so they became integrally entwined in the culture of complaint and the politics of dissent that grew in intensity like a summer storm over the tumultuous months of 1854.
Picking, panning, puddling and cradling required deep reserves of patience in this era of the small-claim system. Minuscule daily rewards only ever amounted to appreciable results after a long haul, if at all. But for that very reason, the process exerted a peculiar hold on the miner. One described the compulsive condition of sinking a hole like this: not knowing what it would be like when we saw it, but fully expecting it every moment.6 This condition of never knowing but always expecting provided the primal force of gold mining’s attraction. It is what historian Chris McConville has dubbed the ‘Existential Now’.7
As with the poker machines of today’s casinos, every push of the button—every thrust of the shovel, thwack of the pick, every flash in the pan—could mean a new destiny, right there and then. Over her five-year career as a gold diggeress, Mary Ann Tyler developed her own explanation of the existential rapture of mining.
You work from day to day with anticipation, and soon the years pass…You can work for very little, and all at once you drop across a fortune. That is why it is so enchanting. You live in expectation…my very soul was lit with delight that I should one day discover more gold.8
European women’s role in Australia’s gold mining history goes back to its very beginnings. Edward Hammond Hargreaves is the man credited with the first discovery of gold at Bathurst, New South Wales, in February 1851. Tired of the cares and troubles of [married] life, Hargreaves had gone to California in 1849. He returned to the Turon Valley and noticed the topographical similarities between the two regions. He decided to go prospecting, on the sly, to test his hunch that there was gold in them thar hills. He went to see Mrs Lister, the publican at the Guyong Inn, a widow who had seen better days. Hargreaves needed a friend. It occurred to me that I could not prosecute my plans efficiently without assistance, he later wrote, and that Mrs Lister was a person in whom I could safely confide. Mrs Lister trusted him too. She furnished Hargreaves with a guide—a black fellow—to penetrate the dense region of forest and lent him her eighteen-year-old son as a companion. Most men had laughed at Hargreaves’ notions, but she entered with a woman’s heartiness into my views. In his 1855 memoir, Hargreaves fully acknowledged that he had Mrs Lister’s generosity of spirit to thank for his subsequent fame. Hargreaves also noted that Mrs Cruikshank, the wife of a squatter on the Turon, was the second person to pan with him (after Mrs Lister’s son). Mrs Cruikshank found gold on her first outing. She quickly expressed her intention of resuming her work; and procuring enough to make some rings.
Victoria also had women at the genesis of one of its most significant gold finds. Following the discovery of gold in Ballarat in August 1851, Margaret Kennedy and Julia Farrell began fossicking in their own backyards. Around the Bendigo Creek, in late September, they had their eureka moment. Unlike Hargreaves, these respectable wives did not pursue celebrity. They continued quietly panning in the creek, and were soon joined by twenty thousand other entrepreneurial souls in the great rush to the Bendigo Valley, ‘the Winter diggings’.
There is also an even chance that Ballarat’s gold was discovered by a woman, since a correspondent to the GEELONG ADVERTISER in September 1852 revealed that the pioneer of the Eureka Lead was an unidentified Aboriginal person: Wathaurung people of both sexes were known to participate in gold mining.9
William Kelly was one of the first commentators to note the everyday sight of women engaged in hands-on mining. Out walking around the Eureka Lead one morning in early 1854, Kelly spied fossickers of the female sex at w
ork, and these, too, of the diminutive degree both as to age and size. You can sense that Kelly longed to mock these mining maids, as was his inclination, but he drew himself up.
And here I must do the women the justice of remarking that their industry was accompanied with a decency of garb and demeanour which elicited respect and went to prove that becoming employment engenders respectability of feeling and healthy appetites.
Working-class women, of course, had always worked. The phenomenon that stopped Kelly short was the presence of ‘decent’ women performing acts of industry. It was just another of the transformations that women needed to effect to be successful in this strange new world.
Perhaps there was also something female-friendly about the work itself, for small-claim alluvial mining was in many ways a holdover from the pre-industrial domestic economy. The modest size of frontages discouraged the introduction of machinery, and working a claim relied on manual exertion rather than progressive technology. William Westgarth referred to the traditional mining cradle, in which gravel from a river’s bed was rocked to separate large rocks and nuggets from the fine particles of silt or gold dust, as this primitive and fatiguing implement. The work didn’t require great physical strength, though, or capital outlay: just patience, perseverance and bucket-loads of luck. Westgarth, writing in 1857, remarked on the peculiarly archaic state of mining technology in the wake of the industrial revolution. There are few vocations, he noted, that can boast such freedom from indebtedness to that great modern creditor in society’s progress—referring, of course, to science.