by Clare Wright
It’s tempting to think that because death was a frequent and indiscriminate visitor in the nineteenth century, those touched by it were less psychologically wounded than we might be today, when science has given us more ‘illusory control’ than humanity has ever before enjoyed. Testimonies of goldfields mourners do not bear out this conceit. Deaths, particularly the deaths of children, were mourned with all the force of a lightning bolt to the heart. A child was considered born under a lucky star if she reached her first birthday on the goldfields.
The MINER AND WEEKLY STAR newspaper reported in January 1860 that of the sixty-one deaths in the Ballarat district in the previous two weeks, fifty-five were children, ninety per cent of whom were under eighteen months old. For the quarter ending in March 1861, in Ballarat alone there were sixty-seven deaths under six months, forty-nine under twelve months, twenty-six under two years and eleven under three years.
Dysentery was the great killer, closely shadowed by maras-mus (an archaic medical term for wasting caused by malnutrition, or what we would now call ‘failure to thrive’) and common diarrhoea.24 George Francis Train described Victoria as a place where children die like the spring flowers.
Mary Ann Tyler, the auspicious diggeress, lost her first baby soon after her birth. I cannot remember who was at the burial, Mary Ann recalled later, I was in such distress and kept fainting. Scottish immigrant Jane McCracken attended the funeral of her four-year-old nephew who drowned in a creek. It was a dreadful tryall for his Mother, wrote Jane in a letter home to Auchencrosh, as far as mind goes [she] has stood the bereavement much better than could be expected but she is very nervous and it has given her a great shock. Apart from base grief, Jane also gave another explanation for the earth-shattering effect of losing a loved one in Victoria. The funeral represented the laying of earth of the First of a Race in a New Country, the land of their adoption. An act of History in a Family, the consecrating of a sacred spot, that indissolvable [sic] link of connection to that soil. Burying the dead in a virgin country meant the start of history and an end to forgetting. Jane herself was terrified that such a destiny might be hers. There has been a good many died in their confinement or soon after it this season that I have heard of which made me more nervous, she wrote to her mother soon after the birth of her second child in April 1853. Death is making many changes among our acquaintances.
When Willie Davis Train became pregnant in May 1854, George Francis sent her back to America to have the baby. He wasn’t prepared to take the risk that this new baby would go the way of their first (who had died in America just prior to the Trains’ passage, so the decision wasn’t entirely rational). Men grieved for their lost babies too. Charles Evans was a young bachelor but he was a keen observer of human tragedy. Evans watched a miner suffer over the death of an infant. He noted in his diary on 8 November 1853 that the clinging insinuating love for a child is one of the greatest happinesses which the labouring man is blessed with and it is a hard trial for him to contemplate the sorrowful gap which the loss of one occasions.
People with strong religious convictions found a common way to bear up under their suffering. I suppose that I must now submit to that humble position in which it has pleased Providence to place me, wrote one woman when grappling with her fate. Divine Providence: the protective care of God. A belief in the higher wisdom and logic of Nature—the idea that there is a sovereignty or superintending power that is beyond our human control—was long the chief opium of the grieving masses. A merciful God would take away, but he could also give. There is an overruling Providence, wrote Jane McCracken, who orders all things wisely and well if we would only trust in him. God alone can give us either prosperity or adversity as he sees good for us. The flip side of the tragic was the miraculous.
But Jane was prescient in realising the dreadful temptation that stalked even the most devout believer in times of adversity. She warned, our carnal hearts is [sic] prone to discontent when worldly things seem to go against us.
A cartoon engraved by Samuel Calvert for MELBOURNE PUNCH in 1856 shows a digger sitting bolt upright in bed, rudely woken by the rain streaming through his patently un-waterproof tent. A dog cowers under the man’s stretcher. A tent-mate sits huddled under a blanket, face obscured. The title of the cartoon is ‘Domestic Bliss in Victoria’. But judging by contemporary accounts of tent living on the goldfields, a little precipitation was the least of your worries. A more chilling prospect was the alarming prevalence of domestic violence in Victoria.
Many female commentators noted that diggers could be rough in their manners, but seldom would they harm a woman. Martha Clendinning recalled that she was never disturbed in her tent at night while her husband was away. One male digger, who was far from enamoured of life on the goldfields, wrote in a letter to a friend, There is one thing, however—bad as the diggers are…I must do them the justice to admit that they prove themselves at least men where a woman is the case.25 Charles Rudston Read similarly noted that he never heard of any outrage or incivility towards a woman on the goldfields inflicted by a stranger. Yet, he added in ominous parentheses, (I have heard screaming and rows, but from whom did it proceed? Invariably husband and wife).
When a woman got spliced, the colonial idiom for either legal or de facto marriage, she took her chances that her new other half would not beat, rape or otherwise abuse her. Popular belief in the apocryphal ‘rule of thumb’—the maximum thickness of an item that could legally be used to beat a wife for the purposes of ‘correction’—was common but assault of a spouse was never in fact legally sanctioned. Rather, in the nineteenth century, wife beating was a widespread social custom, referred to by the French as the English disease.
The problem was that a woman had little practical recourse if she or her children were battered. The control a head of the household could exert over members of his family was paramount in western jurisprudence. A wife was construed as having the legal status of a chattel: an item of property, no better than a slave. Until the passage of the Married Women’s Property Acts in the 1870s, upon marriage a woman lost all rights to ownership of property, and even the custody of her children. Before the end of the 1850s, there was no means of divorce in the Australian colonies. It was not until 1878 that Britain passed laws to allow a woman to obtain a legal separation from a husband on the grounds of cruelty. But well into the twentieth century, as legal historian Jocelynne Scutt has written in her landmark investigation into domestic violence in Australia, ‘the courts continued to enshrine the position of head of family as one to be occupied by a dominant male person, with wife and children submissive adjuncts to his authority’.26
It is impossible to know whether women tended to suffer more at the hands of men they met and married in Victoria, or partners whom they had accompanied across the seas. What is clear, however, is the profound impression that domestic violence had on those who witnessed it on the goldfields. Perhaps this was an effect of the intimacy of living in a tent city, where everything and everyone was experienced up close. Just as you could see through canvas backlit by a candle, so too the sounds of internal struggle could not be muffled. Just as the cries of labour and birth could be heard throughout the immediate vicinity, so too the thumps and screams of a thrashing. The inescapability of family violence on the goldfields startled the largely middle-class chroniclers who had not previously lived in such close proximity to members of the ‘lower orders’. It is a thoroughly discredited myth that the upper echelons of society are immune from spousal abuse; still, on the goldfields a black eye received in a domestic assault was colloquially known as a Hobart Town coat of arms, a reference to the convict stain of Vandemonians.27
Martha Clendinning witnessed the beating of a butcher’s wife, a horrid looking woman. The woman, it was rumoured, was an old lag, transported for killing her baby. I saw the butcher fling her out of the tent and kick her savagely till the blood streamed from her face, wrote Martha, without evident emotion. Mrs Massey was horrified by what she saw of d
omestic bliss on the goldfields. Alas! Poor human nature, she wrote, most of the wives in the camp exhibit on their faces the brutal marks of their husbands fists. Sociologists and social workers report the spikes in domestic violence in the aftermath of floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters. On the goldfields women bore the brunt of men’s need to assert irrefutable physical authority at a time when all else was spiralling out of control. As the balance of gendered power shifted in women’s favour, bigger, more hardened fists could be trusted to beat them back down.
Was domestic violence a crude levelling mechanism, then, or a form of blood sport for the angry and aggrieved?
Thomas Pierson attributed the Victorian phenomenon of public pugilism to rampant intemperance. There are more taverns in Melbourne, according to the population, he wrote, than in any other place I ever saw and yet they are all full from the time they open until they close. It is very common here to see women fighting each other, men licking [beating up] women and women men. A few doors up from Frances and Thomas, a whole household were drunk and fighting one night. The next day they appeared one by one with black eyes and scratched faces. Charles Evans also witnessed the spectacle of a drunken woman staggering along a road on the Ballarat diggings. Her husband tried to drag her home by her wrist. She resisted, wrote Charles, and an interesting struggle took place much to the entertainment of a group of diggers. Henry Mundy recalled a wag playing a trick on this mate by beating an erring wife, thumping a bag of flour and a man’s voice yelling out ‘you call yourself a wife’…then an imitation of a woman’s voice. ‘You wretch you wretch you brute do you call yerself a man’. Thump went the blows again thick and heavy ‘oh oh’ in a wailing woman’s voice. The sham Punch and Judy show went on like this until a crowd rushed to the spot to save the woman from further ill treatment, only to be laughed at. Bare-knuckle boxing. Cock-fighting. Wife-beating. Anything for a dust-up and a wager.
Mrs Massey found the overt violence between men and women more confronting than humorous. She also came up with a plausible explanation for its origin. She too blamed the effects of drink, to which [the diggers] are tempted by disappointment to resort, in order to drown care. According to Mrs Massey’s theory, drink was a way to alleviate despair rather than frivolously pass the time. Once under the influence, the pent-up disenchantment of some diggers then detonated in a savage show of strength against their wives. This was often credited as being part and parcel of the ‘animal instinct’ of the lower orders. (James Bonwick advised frustrated diggers to shoulder their burdens by reading. Battle manfully for mental food, he counselled. When the intellect is starved, the moral power is weakened—thus leading good men, let alone inferior ones, into temptation.)
Jocelynne Scutt claims, however, that violence against women is not used as an outlet or circuit-breaker for frustration and despair (or boredom), but as a way to establish authority over someone who is perceived as a legitimate subject of male domination and control. This is most likely to occur when the man feels powerless: socially, culturally or economically undermined, his prerogative to govern threatened.
Whether by law or circumstance, women generally felt compelled to stand by their beastly man. Yet perpetrators of domestic violence could be forced into a form of public reckoning. Ballarat court records from 1854 and 1855 are full of cases of women hauling their husbands before the magistrates on charges of assault, using abusive language and threatening their life. In some instances, it appears the woman had tried to leave her husband. Elizabeth Johnson charged Thomas Johnson with threatening to have her back to live with him or he would take her life. The case was referred to the police for further investigation. John Williams was charged with beating his wife. He testified that he had not kicked her as she alleged; he had only given her one blow because she would not stay at home. He promised the judge he would not strike her any more but he hoped she would stay at home. The prosecutrix declared that her husband was in the habit of beating her, but had not done so much lately. Williams was bound to keep the peace for three months, with two sureties of £10.28 Many such cases ended by being settled out of court, or by both parties failing to appear. Women may have used the justice system as a way of leveraging power they could not otherwise muster. In doing so, they took a calculated risk that the act of public disclosure would not further inflame a husband whose self-esteem was already at rock bottom.
Court cases give us rare access to the voices of women who did not have the leisure or literacy to write diaries—a sneak peak behind closed calico. Mary Ann Clay, for example, charged George Copely with violently assaulting her. Mary Ann said on oath:
I am the wife of Elijah Clay of Ballarat. My husband had a few words with me on Thursday the 5th [of January 1854]. [Copely] began to interfere. He has one tent and we have another. I told him to mind his own business and affairs. He then called me most awful names unfit to mention. I went to sleep and he woke me by the names he was calling me. I went to his tent and asked what he meant by it and what he should interfere for in my husband’s business and mine. He jumped out of his bed and kicked me violently in the head and various parts of my body and ill-treated me and struck my child. The kicks and blows cut my head. I had told him that he had no business to interfere between me and my husband… The assault took place in the defendant’s tent. I used no bad language nor gave him any provocation. I swear positively that I was not drunk that day.
Copely pleaded not guilty. Police Magistrate John D’Ewes disagreed, and fined him £5 or one month’s prison.
Mary Ann had justice on her mind. At the same court session, she charged her husband Elijah with assault.
On Thursday night the 5th I went to a store on these diggings to pay for a dress I had bought. When I returned my husband said did you pay that pound I said yes. We had supper and afterwards we had some words. I wanted to reason with my husband but he would not hear. He beat me most dreadfully about my head and face. It was then he gave me the blow on the jaw. I forgave him for that blow.
Like Copely, Elijah Clay pleaded not guilty. But this time Mary Ann withdrew her complaint, and Elijah was ordered to find sureties of £40 to keep the peace for six months.
Because of the unprecedented economic opportunities available to women in the early gold rush, some found they could successfully leave abusive or otherwise damaging relationships. Eliza Perrin sailed to Victoria from Derbyshire in June 1853 with her daughter Fanny. Her husband John was already in the colony. The reunited family went to Ballarat. Before long, Eliza realised John was no more inclined towards gallant husbandhood than he had been in England. Her letters home are not explicit about the shame of domestic violence, but she alludes to it. Alas the one I was tied to was far from being what he ought to have been, she wrote to her cousin in 1859.
I will not say much in writing but as regards behaviour from him I have had about the worst. We might have been well to do if he had been like myself persevering but he carried on as he did at home with his drink and jealousy until at last I brought him before his betters and he was bound over to keep the peace for six months.29
After Eliza’s day in court, John left to live with his brothers. Eliza had been keeping a Refreshment House, but John drank and destroyed all that I had before he went away. John paid no maintenance for their three children and Eliza heard he was passing as a single young man. In the meantime, Eliza rebuilt her business, saving money and eventually building a public house for £70 on the main Melbourne to Ballarat road. Through her good relationship with Ballarat’s merchants, she was able to buy any amount of goods…all in my own name. It was only with my own endeavours that I had kept the 3 children and myself, wrote Eliza to her cousin.
He does not know that the house belongs to me or anything in it. The Divorce Act is not passed here yet or I would be rid of him altogether. I am determined he shall not live with me anymore. I only wish I had left him sooner and you had been out here. We should have had money in our pockets. I think of buying 2 or 3 acres of gro
und at the back [of the public house]…I am rearing poultry and fencing in a garden. I can hire a man for 15 shillings per week and find him meat that will pay me better than a miserable husband.
Eliza encouraged her cousin, who had a fatherless child, to come to Victoria. But never let it be known but what your husband is dead, Eliza advised. The women and their children could enjoy both the fruits of Eliza’s hard-won independence and the frontier trend for identity fraud.
The early gold rush period represents a unique state of social fluidity, as hundreds of thousands of people effectively became hunter-gatherers, classic nomads following one rush after another. Whole communities could disappear literally overnight, on the back of a rumour that a glittering new lead had been unearthed in a distant gully. Like solipsistic gypsies, gold seekers carried their homes on their backs and told their own fortunes.
But in a place where housing was temporary, clothing was rudimentary and work was almost exclusively manual, what was to distinguish the civilised folk from the so-called savages? To confuse matters further, the Wathaurung were not merely spectators of the curious ways of these feverish strangers; they were speculators in their own right, accepting the risk of remaining on their traditional lands, not just in fulfilment of spiritual obligations, but in the hope of economic reward too. If you looked closely, you could see white men acting like wild beasts while black men lived on the profits of their labours.
Some observers noted the success of Indigenous people in selling cloaks and rugs, yet, almost without exception, commentators chose to focus on the gender relations they observed among Aboriginal tribes. Robert Caldwell is typical. The natives, he wrote in 1854, are the most miserable beings…As among other savages, the women do all the work, while the men lie idle in the sun. He called up every racially charged cliché in the book: uncivilised, naked, heathen. To Caldwell, talk of Aboriginal land rights, which he had evidently heard, was nothing more than mawkish philosophy. He believed it was no more of an injustice to deprive the black man of his land than that of a kangaroo or cockatoo. The Aborigine did not possess it, because he did not cultivate it. And why did the Aboriginal man squander the opportunity to work the land? Because he was content to leave the poor squaws labouring under heavy loads, while the men burden themselves with little or nothing. Such an appalling lack of manliness was what set the Aborigines apart from the white diggers whose steadfast labour underpinned their virtue.