by Clare Wright
What was more, the blacks beat their women! J. J. Bond observed that when Aboriginal men were drunk at night, you could hear their loud yabbering and the howling of the lubras as their menfolk beat them. Thomas McCombie extended description to judgment. The domestic relations of the aborigines are only suitable to a race at the very bottom of the scale of refinement, he wrote. Evidence for the prosecution? They don’t marry, their women are given away against their will by male relatives, who are mean spirited enough to desire the wages of such prostitution, then are beaten if they won’t go quietly, even speared on the spot if very obstinate. The Aboriginal women, conceded McCombie, are naturally well-behaved, but are treated with cruel neglect, regarded by their menfolk as mere domestic slaves to obtain provisions or to drudge for them.
The fact that so many white men on the goldfields were dependent on their wives or other women for financial support was a contradiction that, unsurprisingly, went unremarked.
If Aborigines were condemned for the shabby treatment of their women, the Chinese diggers were reviled for an even greater sin: they did not bring their women with them at all. The fraught relationship between Europeans and Chinese on the goldfields is a well-worked claim in Australian history. School children are typically taught about the Lambing Flat riots on the Burrangong goldfields in New South Wales in 1861. In this incident, long-held anti-Chinese animosity spilt over into a brutal massacre, with thousands of miners actively rallying against the Chinese diggers to drive them off the field and the police called in to quell the riot.
But the forces of the state were hardly impartial adjudicators. The state-sanctioned discrimination of taxing Chinese immigrants to disembark in Victoria (which began in 1855) gave the lie to the idea of a utopian brotherhood of man under the Southern Cross. Classically, the complaints made against the Chinese were that they muddied the water holes through their tendency to work over the tailings of European diggers, that they worked on the Sabbath, that they were thieves and gamblers, and that they accepted low wages and would therefore drive down the value of labour. But in 1854, the chief grievance against the Chinese was their dubious, and possibly devious, homogeneity.
This was the problem: the Chinese kept to themselves. Though they seemed harmless, they came to Victoria in great numbers—thousands at a time, wrote one commentator—and stuck together, walking in long files to the goldfields and then setting up separate camps. Here, they ate their own strange food and dressed in their own strange costumes: high conical hats instead of the ubiquitous cabbage hat, loose gowns that looked like women’s attire and long pigtails that were similarly more suited to a schoolgirl than a working man. They practised their own medicine—acupuncture was readily available at the Chinese camps, and some Europeans availed themselves of its benefits—and they opened their own restaurants. They preferred opium to alcohol. And they diligently sent their winnings home to family members in China, where their wives were looking after the old and the young in the community in line with Confucian tradition, rather than blowing it on a spree. All this marked the Chinese out as different and peculiar.
But who might be hurt by John Chinaman? European women. This is what Mrs W. May Howell was warned when she went to the diggings. Oh the diggers would not annoy you, she was told by a friend. It’s those brutes of Chinamen; but they’d better not begin to insult white women, or they’ll find it rather dangerous. Though Mrs Howell’s friend admitted he had never heard of it happening at any diggings, you had to wonder at what a man wouldn’t be capable of when he had none of his own kind of woman about. And what better way to assert one’s own manliness than to threaten vengeance on any cur who dared touch his womenfolk?
Early in 1855, a scandal erupted in Melbourne that brought to a head all the disparate suspicion of the Chinese diggers’ masculine exclusivity. Police discovered a set of foul and wicked prints. The pictures, which were evidently of naked ladies (whether Chinese or European is not clear) and were said to bring the blush of shame and indignation into the cheek of respectable men, were being sold on the sly to Europeans. One writer, suspicious of Melburnians’ tendency to lurch from panic to panic, wrote an article on ‘The Chinese Puzzle’ in the MELBOURNE MONTHLY MAGAZINE. He was a lone voice in publicly defending the Chinese, pointing out their industry and energy, their impeccable credentials as citizens, their intelligence and cleanliness. But ask a Britoner on the street what objection they have to the Celestials, he wrote, and they will answer: Morals, sir, morals. Pagans, you know Pagans. No Mrs Chisholm at the Chinese Ports…no wives for the Pagans, sir, Prints, sir, improper Prints.
Without women to keep them on the straight and narrow, no wonder they wanted to look at dirty pictures. Or so the scaremongering tactics went. The panic reached fever pitch in 1856 when a prosperous high-class English-born prostitute called Sophia Lewis was found murdered in her bed, her neck slashed from ear to ear. Sophia was known to entertain rich Chinese merchants in her Little Bourke Street brothel; she spoke Cantonese and decorated her parlour with oriental ornaments. Two Chinese men were tracked to the Bendigo diggings and eventually tried and hanged for her murder—although there were many who doubted the competence of the police investigation.30
As the writer of ‘The Chinese Puzzle’ duly noted, the only argument against an otherwise intelligent, educated and industrious people was the absence of their wives. The rest was blind prejudice. We are afraid of the Chinese, and we have not the moral courage to say so, he wrote. Meanwhile, Mrs Chisholm is requested to smuggle us a few China women, and, by all means, to let those she brings be young. Failing that improbable event, the writer suggested another course of action. Miscegenation. Encouraging some of the pagans to unite themselves to more durable British spinsters and attaching themselves to the soil of Victoria was the crucial piece of the racial puzzle. The conundrum of division and prejudice would only be solved once the Chinese inter-married to found a new family upon the face of the earth.
The fate of the Chinese was sealed when the Gold Fields Commission, empowered to investigate the turbulence on the diggings in late 1854, handed down its final report in April 1855. It estimated that there were up to 3000 Chinese in Ballarat, 2000 in Bendigo, 1000 in Forest Creek and, most disturbingly, 1400 landed in Melbourne in the month of February 1855. The question of the influx of such large numbers of a pagan and inferior race is a very serious one, judged the commission. Even if the Chinese were considered desirable colonists, they are unaccompanied by their wives and families, under which circumstances no immigration can prove of real advantage to any society. According to the commission’s report, the Chinese immigrants’ low scale of domestic comfort, incurable habit of gaming and absurd superstition were vicious tendencies that were degrading to the morale of a civilised white society. Victoria needed rational men, graced by a woman’s touch, to restore its presently deranged society to an even keel.
Within a few months of the Gold Fields Commission report, a law was passed charging the Chinese £10 per head to land in Victoria. They came in greater numbers than ever before, disembarking at Robe in South Australia and walking 400 kilometres overland to the diggings. The racialised poll tax was a gamble that never produced dividends for the Victorian Government. It was classic loss chasing; they should have learned by then.
Only one other minority group received as much private and public commentary as Aborigines and the Chinese. Jews. Remember the Californian digger who jibed that you knew the good old days had ended once the women and Jews arrived? In Victoria, the wisecrack never quite held up. Jewish miners were among the first on the fields, and their presence in Ballarat is indivisible from the establishment and progress of the Lucky City.
In 1851, there were 364 Jews in Victoria, two-thirds the number there were in New South Wales. The Victorian Census recorded 2903 Jews in 1861: 1857 males and 1046 females. Overall, the Jewish population of Australia trebled in the decade between 1851 and 1861, allowing Jewish congregations to become self-sufficient for the first time
. While the Victorian Jewish community increased almost tenfold over this period, the New South Wales community did not quite double. By 1861, the Jewish population of Australia constituted 0.48 per cent of the total, a proportion that has not changed significantly since that time.31 Such was the impact of gold.
The Ballarat Hebrew Congregation was established in the dining room of the Clarendon Hotel in Lydiard Street South, just a stone’s throw from the Government Camp, on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) 11 October 1853.32 Henry Harris, who may have been a Cornish Jew, ran the Clarendon Hotel. Harris was also the first president of the Congregation.33 One of the founding members was Charles Dyte, a thirty-two-year-old Londoner five feet tall, with mercantile training. He arrived in Ballarat in August 1853 and wasted no time in setting up a prominent auction house.
Many gold rush Jews came from Britain and bore anglicised names such as Harris, Franks, Marks, Isaacs, Simons, Josephs, Davis and Moss. There was also a fair share of the more distinguishable Levys, Cohens and Lazaruses. Others came from the wider Jewish Diaspora, particularly Germany and parts of Eastern Europe. Annie Silberberg was born in Poland in 1836 and educated in Paris. She arrived in Victoria in August 1853 with her parents Golda and Jacques, and siblings Esther, Eva, Meyer and Isaac. Annie married Lewis Hollander at Melbourne’s Stephen Street synagogue in 1860, moved to Ballarat and bore sixteen children.
Rebecca Abrahams married Polish-born Alfred Isaacs in London in August 1853 and set out for Victoria soon after, arriving in 1854 on the Queen of the East. Her first son, Isaac, became Governor-General of Australia in 1934, after serving as a member of Australia’s first federal parliament, attorney general and Chief Justice of the High Court. Isaac Isaacs described his mother as an extraordinarily gifted woman with a phenomenal faculty of absorbing and retaining knowledge who personally supervised the education of each of her four living children. From 1859, the Isaacs family lived in the gold towns of Yackandandah and Beechworth.34
Though some Jews did actively mine for gold, they more commonly entered into business on the goldfields, rapidly assuming leading positions as auctioneers, storekeepers, hawkers, jewellers, tobacconists and publicans. (Alfred Isaacs was a tailor.) This follows the pattern of Jewish integration into other western communities; the Jews of Cornwall, for example, occupied the trades of silversmith, watchmaker, pawnbroker, merchant, pedlar, auctioneer and brokers, with women working as milliners, dressmakers and shopkeepers.35 The Jews of Victoria chased a new opportunity for enterprise and endeavour, but they did not break the pattern of previous migrations.
Unlike the Chinese, Ballarat’s Jews were quickly accepted as part of the vibrant, edgy, entrepreneurial flavour of the day. Being there at the genesis of a new local community, Jews were able to play leading roles in the establishment of institutions and civic ideas, rather than accommodating themselves to the scraps they were thrown by a chary host. London Jews, by contrast, had historically become pedlars and secondhand dealers because of a city ordinance prohibiting Jews entering the retail trades. Depending on the locality, similar restriction applied to the finance sector and the professions. In continental Europe the ghetto system established such occupational boundaries geographically. But in Australia, there was no such formal impediment to freedom of movement or trade.
Still, anti-Semitism was alive and well in the partisan prism of individual minds. Mrs Massey, in surveying the many nations assembled in Victoria, singled out a dark, Jewish-looking man for special comment. His black eyes, wrote Mrs Massey, showed more than shrewdness; it amounted to unpleasant cunning. She made no such remarks about the Egyptians, Syrians, Persians, Indians, Maoris and African-Americans whom she also encountered on Melbourne’s streets. Henry Mundy performed a stylised rendition of a visit to a jew’s shop in Collins Street: you vant a pair trousers…I sell sheep, very sheep, yo get nodding so sheep in anoder shop. Oddly, MELBOURNE PUNCH, which began publication in late 1855, ran a regular column called ‘Shylock’, which purported to expose Jewish converts to Christianity. It may have been a victory to convert the heathen Chinese, but successful evangelism in the Jewish community purportedly exposed the scheming duplicity of its members.
In October 1856, following the depiction of a German Jew as naturally criminal in Ballarat’s MINER AND WEEKLY STAR newspaper, Charles Dyte wrote a letter to the editor pointing out that Jews as Cosmopolitans [have] ever been esteemed as being most loyal, orderly and quiet. It is significant that Dyte felt enough confidence in his own social status to stand up and defend his people publicly. He had good reason to be assertive. Though he was less than five feet tall, Ikey Dyte was a big man on campus. He would go on to become the chairman of the Ballarat Mining Exchange, the chairman of the first borough council of East Ballarat and a Member of the Legislative Assembly from 1864 to 1871. Dyte would later be hailed for play[ing] his part manfully in the famous affair at Eureka.36
If the Chinese were tarnished for deliberately leaving their women behind as permanent grass widows, the Jews faced a different problem. An article appearing in the LONDON JEWISH CHRONICLE in August 1852 summed up the challenge:
The recent discoveries of gold have tempted many young men to leave the land of their birth and depart in pursuit of fortune. Among their ranks the young Hebrew has gone also to seek an independence by frugal habits, industrious pursuits, and the sweat of his brow…the steady-going English Jew will not expect to build up a fortune with such rapidity… yet, by reason of the fast increasing population of the gold colonies, he will see the acquisition of gain must of necessity become a work of time. Such being the true state of the case, the young Jewish emigrant will find that after he has become settled…the social and domestic feeling, inherited from his ancestors, will make him find that he requires affection; that he wants a home; that he craves a gentle partner, who by her assiduous love and sweetness may lighten his labour.37
So, the Jewish immigrant supposedly played his game according to reason, not chance. But he was, nonetheless, a man of emotion. His independence was not predicated on fleeing the cloying constraints of domesticity. Rather, he coveted a home of love and sweetness as just reward for industry. But where would he find such a homemaker, when there were so few Jewish girls in Australia? The CHRONICLE had a solution. It called for English rabbis to preach female emigration from the pulpit, unless in the interim a Mrs Chisholm rises up out of Israel. This was the only thing that would save many a young man from marrying a Christian. The rallying cry was heard, apparently, and by August 1853 none other than the real Caroline Chisholm came to the rescue. With the Jewish Ladies Benevolent Society of London, she corralled a contingent of twenty ready and willing single Jewish women. The precious cargo sailed on the newly built Caroline Chisholm, along with other Jewish families immigrating to Australia. The spectre of intermarriage was averted—for a time at least. Two generations on, few of the grandchildren of the gold rush Jews still identified themselves as Jewish.38
Robert Caldwell predicted that Victoria would provide the peaceful gathering place for all nations. But plenty of others mapped a social geography of division and distinction. Jews and other minority religious groups were not eligible for public aid to establish denominational schools. In 1854, there was a growing movement for a change to the relevant act of parliament, but William Westgarth favoured abolishing aid altogether and returning to pure user-pays. This, he argued, would be the only truly non-discriminatory practice, if Victoria were to live up to its reputation of political and social inclusiveness. Colonial liberality was a tetchy beast; it relied on visionary leaders to give constitutional rights their cultural claws. To dream of excluding a Jew from the colonial parliament would be as foreign to the law as to the public sentiment, wrote Westgarth in 1858, the same year that the Melbourne Club moved out of John Pascoe Fawkner’s pub and into its purpose-built citadel in Collins Street. Jews were customarily barred from the elite gentlemen’s club, and women were officially disqualified.
William Westgarth noted tha
t there was a sprinkling of all the nations of the earth on the Ballarat goldfields—he estimated that ten per cent of the population was foreign—but each tended to stick to its own turf. In particular, he pointed out a locality thirty metres distant from any other tents that was inhabited by several hundred Frenchmen. Raffaello Carboni, an Italian, noted that the English, Germans and Scots diggers of Ballarat worked generally on the Gravel Pits, while the Irish had their stronghold on the Eureka. The Americans, he tells us in typically idiosyncratic fashion, fraternised with all the wide-awake, ubi caro, ibi vultures. The Latin translates roughly as ‘where there is flesh, there are vultures’.
This aphorism neatly sums up the suspicion and wariness with which many British immigrants viewed the large contingent of Americans on the goldfields. Thomas Pierson, the Philadelphia freemason, noted a general prejudice against Americans, which he put down to envy of their superiority in all things. Westgarth, on the other hand, noted the American belief in self-adjustment rather than government regulation; their trust in human nature over vested authority. People accustomed to self-government, these commentators worried, were bound to clash with people accustomed to the rule of law. We have no sympathy with mob law in the Queen’s dominions, said Henry Mundy ruefully. The mob was such an unruly, unpredictable ogre precisely because it was constituted by such a diverse range of human beings, all with their own codes, superstitions, values, resentments, methods of wish-fulfilment and personal histories of loss, shame and frustration.