by Clare Wright
The majority of the goldfields population laboured under a common illusion of youth: the idea that honest industry and good intentions would bring just rewards. They were wrong.
The well-being of a colony, wrote James Bonwick in 1852, is intimately associated with marriage. This is just what the state wanted its restive citizens to believe. The discovery of gold might have resulted in moral chaos, but it had been noted since the 1840s that the lack of women’s ‘civilising influence’ had led to sodomy, prostitution, the sexual abuse of Aboriginal women and killing of mixed-race babies, as well as that thorny old perennial of social control, drunkenness. Governor La Trobe’s vision was that social stability would result from equal numbers of the sexes. From 1852, the government’s interest in importing women into the colony changed from supplying labour to rectifying the gender imbalance.12 Boatloads of young assisted female immigrants would arrive, they hoped, to be snapped up at the wharves by the hordes of eligible bachelors. Statistically, the design worked. In 1850, there were 2668 marriages registered in Victoria. In 1853 this had skyrocketed to 6946 recorded nuptials. But then a curious thing happened. Despite the steady increases in population, the targeted migration programs and the hefty demographic bulge in the twenty to thirty age bracket, the marriage rate remained remarkably flat. There were only 7760 marriages in 1854, 7816 in 1855 and 8254 in 1856. This suggests that although it was a seller’s market, women were choosing not to put up their wares.13
There’s no doubt that women in Victoria felt a power in the marriage stakes that they had never experienced before. Ellen Clacy arrived in Victoria in the winter of 1852 as a single woman accompanied by her brother, and departed in April 1853 on the arm of her husband. On her return to England, she wrote an advice manual for women desiring to emigrate. Do so by all means, she counselled, the worst risk you run is that of getting married and finding yourself treated with twenty times the respect and consideration you may meet in England. The reason for this unaccustomed reverence? According to Ellen, the imbalance of the sexes meant we may be pretty sure of having our own way.
Englishman Henry Catchpole, who arrived in Melbourne in February 1854, wrote home to encourage his sisters to emigrate and get a Golden Husband. Tell them that it is a first rate opportunity for them. After six months in the colony, he was still on message. There are many young chaps looking out in Melbourne when the ship comes in, wrote Henry. I shall soon begin to think about doing the same for I am really sick and tired of so much male society. Henry expressed unease that men of thirty to forty years of age were actually marrying girls at 15 and 16 on these diggings due to the numerical disproportions.14 It was a competitive market for wives. Some women talked of men as if they were prize studs, assessing their attributes with an air of studied detachment. There is a hardiness and manliness about the colonial gentlemen which I find pleasing, wrote Mary Bristow.
If women could pluck husbands like so many wild flowers, why do the marriage statistics suggest they were reluctant to do so? For some daughters, life in the colonies meant the blessed chance to escape—at least for a defined period of their choosing—the cloying family obligations and small horizons of parish life. Most of them literate, with an exalted sense of entitlement, these harbingers of change no longer looked to the past (or their parents) for example. Catherine Chisholm, a thirty-three-year-old unmarried woman from rural Scotland, was constantly chided by her family for not sending more news of her comings and goings in Victoria, including her marriage in 1857, four years after her arrival. We are greatly astonished at you for not mentioning anything concerning your husband, scolded Catherine’s brother Colin, taking up the paternal authority of her recently deceased father. Even what is his name, is he a native of the colony, or is he a native of Britain and what is he at for his daily bread. Away from prying eyes, some gold rush women enjoyed the anonymity of distance.15
The fact that women of humble birth could make discerning (and secretive) choices about their prospective partners bordered on the subversive. The imperial anxiety caused by this unexpected development is perfectly captured in another of John Leech’s cartoons for London PUNCH. In ‘Alarming Prospect: The Single Ladies off to the Diggings’, Leach depicts the preposterous idea that instead of men choosing their brides at the wharf, the women were thumbing their noses at offers from decent, upstanding gentlemen and electing to head to the goldfields on their own. A cottage! Fiddle de dee Sir! exclaims one pretty bonneted lass. Bother yer Hundred Pounds and House in the Public line, says an imperious woman with head held high. The women help each other to debark from the ship, to the confusion and consternation of the men who thought they could prance in as shining knights and wander home with a full-time cook gratis.
Englishman Henry Catchpole revealed what men were forced to do when they could neither afford domestic help nor snare a wife. He wrote home to his mother, I can now roast meat, make plum puddings, pies and tarts…I’m a first-rate washerwoman, or if the lasses like, washerman…I am also a capital chambermaid. Instead of digging for gold, young Henry was left shovelling his own shit.
In the anything-goes early years of the gold rush, tying the knot became a favourite avenue for conspicuous consumption. Fortunate diggers, observed Jane McCracken, would do anything to spend money and so be seen that they have it. What better way for a young man to prove to his peers that he has thrived and prospered than to show off a trophy bride? Saturday night in Collins Street, Melbourne circa 1854 was like a weekly Brownlow Medal count: a spectacle of tarted-up horseflesh arrayed in celebration of virility.16 Here, lucky diggers would come to town to parade their good fortune in the cultural phenomenon of the ‘Digger’s Wedding’. Ellen Clacy reported that diggers’ weddings were all the rage. Thomas McCombie described the event as an exhibition so fantastic and absurd that it symbolised the convulsion under which the social system of Victoria was at the time labouring.
This is the staging. A newly cashed-up digger would pay a woman to act as a model bride. He would deck her out in the finest wedding couture a nugget could buy, hire carriages and coachmen in gaudy livery, and purchase half the stock of the nearest pub. Very commonly, according to McCombie, the girl was a domestic servant (not a prostitute), a fat, stumpy girl, redolent of the most odious vulgarity, who would delight in being plucked out of an obscure kitchen and thrust into a situation of temporary notoriety. A crowd of intoxicated digger mates would march alongside the carriage all the way to the bayside suburb of St Kilda, where there would be a champagne dinner for all. The women drank too, leading McCombie to demur that the after-dinner orgies therefore need not be minutely detailed.
Like the line-crossing ceremony at sea, this was Carnival. Cinderella without the sentimental ending. Performance art. The sham wedding cocked a snook at the modes and morals of conventional respectability. In a mock wedding, the prosperous gent got to flaunt his success (without actually assuming the responsibilities of marriage) and the lucky lady got to keep her gowns and jewels (with a minimum of mutual obligation). James Bonwick had placed his civilised faith in the institution of marriage, but now found that the freedom of marriages led to grotesque and immoral scenes. It was not unheard of to spend £200 in a single evening. By the next morning, the carriage had turned back into a pumpkin and the digger returned to the goldfields to chase the next windfall. In the elaborate theatre of the Digger’s Wedding, the inversions and reversions happened virtually overnight. The only lasting change occurred if the ersatz bride contributed another entry to the expanding ledger of ex-nuptial pregnancies.
Remarkably, in 1854 there were seventy registered births in Victoria for which the name of the father is listed as unknown. The baby is given his or her mother’s surname. For some women, the father’s identity truly may have been a mystery. Others were simply unmarried. Registering the birth of a legally illegitimate chid was an extraordinary public disclosure and suggests that women were less eager to cover the tracks of ex-nuptial conception, and less likely to see another man’
s child as an impediment to future marriage prospects, at a time when it was a seller’s market. It was also not uncommon for single mothers to apply to magistrates for maintenance orders for their children. Court reporters conveyed such cases without an overtone of scandal. This is fascinating, suggesting a lack of shame—even a sense of implied legitimacy—on the women’s part. In an era when the demand for popular rights and freedoms was a mounting clamour, even a woman beyond the pale of respectability might draw public attention to her quest for justice—and expect restitution.
The moment did not last. In 1855, fifty births were registered with an unknown father and in 1856—none! (Less than half a dozen ex-nuptial births per year were recorded over the next decade.) You can bet your last Trojan that ex-nuptial conception was still happening. But women were no longer prepared to out themselves. Cue the long reign of illegal abortions, shotgun weddings and benevolent homes for fallen women.
In the mid-nineteenth century, few women faced childbirth free of the well-founded fear of death. They weren’t just aware the odds were against them; they could feel it in their waters. In fact, women referred to their entire pregnancy as a period of sickness. In popular euphemism, to labour was to be ill. The linguistic delicacy made sense. Up until the 1940s, maternal death ranked second only to tuberculosis as a killer of Australian women aged between fifteen and forty-nine.17 There are no official maternal or infant mortality statistics available for the early period of Victoria’s history. But based on records from Melbourne’s Royal Women’s Hospital, historian Janet McCalman calculates that from 1856 to 1874, stillbirths fluctuated between four and eleven per cent, while maternal death rates could be as high as 4.5 per cent, or one in every 22.5 confinements.18 As these numbers were achieved in a hospital, with midwives and obstetricians on hand, it is likely the maternal mortality rate on the goldfields was much higher. Dr Walter Richardson (father of the author Henry Handel Richardson), who practised in Ballarat in the mid-1850s, estimated that seven per cent of full-term births ended in a fatality.19 He attributed this shameful record to the unsanitary squalor of Ballarat and the inadequate colonial laws that permitted unqualified charlatans and drunken illiterates to attend confinements on the goldfields, resulting in otherwise preventable deaths, stillbirths and deformities. International studies of maternal mortality in the nineteenth century support him: they show that the quality of obstetric care available to women was the definitive risk factor. Though malnutrition and other pre-existing health problems could contribute to childbirth complications, the single most important predictor of poor outcomes was access to an experienced accoucheur.
On the goldfields, as the diligent Dr Richardson attested, finding a good doctor was very chancy. Mothers, friends or neighbours were most likely to attend births on the diggings. Such women may or may not have had experience in delivering babies, particularly obstructed labours or high-risk deliveries such as twins or breech births. And prior to the development of antiseptic practices in 1870, post-partum infection was just as deadly following labour as maternal exhaustion and haemorrhage were during it. Henry Mundy noted that in Ballarat in 1854, a Mrs Charlton was the most famous midwife round her quarter. Mrs Charlton was a forty-five-year-old woman from Nottinghamshire who always had a joke and a pleasant word for everyone. But her patch may have been very small, limited to those in her immediate locality. It’s also not clear whether she was a trained or lay midwife. There is no evidence that there were any trained midwives practising on the early goldfields.
In all probability, Mrs Charlton provided her services cheaply. The same cannot be said for the goldfields doctors, who were largely reviled as opportunist vultures, extorting profit from a vulnerable population. The standard call-out fee for a birth was a whopping £5, the same amount as the fine for failing to show a valid mining licence.20 Dr James Selby came to Victoria in 1852 to become a digger. It quickly became apparent to him that he would make much more by my profession than gold seeking in the earth. He soon found that he had as much work as he could handle and, as people continued to flood onto the fields, the remuneration is increased tenfold. No man after practising here, wrote Selby, would be content to receive the London prices. (And he only charged £1 for a birth.)21 It didn’t help the community standing of doctors that, until 1865, there was no system of registration for legally qualified medical practitioners. Medical historian Keith Bowden has claimed that the Ballarat goldfields were ‘awash with quacks and imposters’.
Henry Mundy paid for two doctors and a midwife to attend the birth of his wife Ann’s first child. But not even this precaution could save the baby, who was sacrificed to salvage the mother—this generally meant cranial crushing to remove the baby from the mother’s body. Seventeen-year-old Ann suffered a long labour. All the women who busied themselves around Ann looked gloomy and distressed. Henry stayed out of the tent. For God’s sake…save my poor little wife’s life at all hazards, beseeched Henry, never mind the baby. Ann barely cheated death. Later, Henry buried the baby in a rough box on the side of a range and fenced the grave with barked saplings where no diggings were likely to occur. Come Ann’s second delivery a year later, she was dreading I should be as I was the last time, but thank God it was nothing this time like that. Baby George was born healthy and whole. I’m so thankful it is all over, said Ann, high on hormones, relief and the brandy she was given as the only form of pain relief.
When things went wrong in childbirth, the results could be ghoulishly catastrophic: cervical tears, prolapsed uteri, pelvic damage. British women were traditionally delivered lying on their left sides, which was thought to lessen the likelihood of perineal trauma. Women still tore, though, and the result would be a mangled anal sphincter and the lifelong opprobrium of faecal incontinence. Nineteenth-century midwifery practice included packing the vagina and perineal tears with rock salt. Women may also have had their knees tied together to facilitate healing.22 Yet recurrent infections at scar sites, exacerbated by repeated births—one child born every two years from age twenty to forty was the regular pattern—plagued women of all class, ethnic and religious origins. Childbirth was, perhaps, the only true social leveller.
Goldfields residents may have despised doctors for their extortionate fees, but doctors blamed midwives for the high rates of maternal and infant mortality. They were locked in a tussle for vocational supremacy that often went all the way to the courts. One such skirmish occurred when Mrs Katherine Hancock died eleven days after giving birth to her fourth child. Her birth attendant, Mrs Elizabeth Hazlehurst, was charged with manslaughter. Katherine was administered gin and sherry on the orders of the socially prominent Dr Wakefield. Mrs Hazlehurst testified that, in her opinion, the baby was wrong for the world and she had to turn it. (Katherine, before her death, reportedly remarked, if that was turning a child, she would not like to go through it again.) But the birth proceeded quickly and the baby was born with a fine head of hair, ready for the curling irons. Mrs Hazlehurst left, and a neighbour, Louisa Vining, stayed through the night. At the trial Mrs Hazlehurst explained she was employed as a midwife, not as a nurse tender. Dr Wakefield visited Katherine five days after the birth. He found her low and weak, with her uterus completely inverted and external to her person. She died five days later of mortification of the uterus. A post-mortem concluded that Katherine’s uterus was hanging from her vagina and some of her small intestines had also been pulled out of her body.
The court case turned on whether the use of stimulants had caused the inverted uterus. Dr Wakefield testified that labouring women were regularly given as much as a whole bottle of brandy, even by medical men. The real problem, he charged, was the ineptitude of Mrs Hazlehurst. I have attended thousands of women, never with a midwife in attendance, boasted Dr Wakefield. Other doctors agreed the only cause of uterus inversion could be gross ignorance and the expulsive power used for the birth of a child. The jury found Mrs Hazlehurst guilty, but made a recommendation to mercy. Their rider, it seems, was occasioned by the
lengthy statement made by Mrs Hazlehurst in her own defence at the conclusion of the trial. This is how the BALLARAT TIMES reported her mercy plea:
She considered from her knowledge of medical terms, that she could have conducted her case better than [her defence lawyer] Mr Dunne; she attended the deceased purely from benevolence; she had been 16 year a midwife—never had a bad case, and was called, proverbially, ‘The Lucky Woman’. Dr Wakefield had a spite against her, and never had a previous opportunity of venting it. She had confined Mrs Vining herself, and with perfect success.
Mrs Hazlehurst then gave an extensive account of her midwifery experience and asked the judge to treat her leniently. Despite the fact that Mrs Hazlehurst had managed to impugn the reputation of both her lawyer and a high-flying doctor, the judge was persuaded by her testimony. The Lucky Woman was fined £20 and ordered to serve one hour in prison.23