by Clare Wright
A conciliation of such diverse pretensions and interests, realised the Swiss miner Charles Eberle, will not be achieved without conflict.
SEVEN
THE WINTER OF THEIR DISCONTENT
It was to be a winter of untold discontent.
By June, plummeting temperatures amplified the cruelty of the past weeks’ driving rain. With the benefit of modern meteorology, we now know that the mercury dips lower in Ballarat than just about anywhere else in Victoria outside the Alpine regions. It is only 115 kilometres from metropolitan Melbourne, only 435 metres above sea level, yet it has a mean (very mean) winter maximum temperature of 10.7 degrees Celsius. And then there’s the cunning wind chill factor: a southwesterly draught of cold discomfort blowing down off the escarpment. No one was immune from the surly blast. Those perched up in the Camp and those nestled down on the Flat all shivered in their tents, imagining what family and friends at home were doing in the northern summer sunshine.
Jones’ Circus might have been emblematic of gold rush illusions, but its tent was exceptional for its size and solidity. It was like a citadel compared with the simple pitched-roof tents of most miners and shopkeepers and their families. Many diggers slept on the bare ground, noted Thomas McCombie, with a canvas fly for protection from the rain and wind. According to McCombie, a great number of single men lived under the eucalypt branches they made into miams or wigwams. Frances Pierson, on the other hand, had made a cosy tent home for herself, Thomas and Mason. She had transported feather beds, bedsteads and a mountain of covers to the diggings. The Piersons had been warned that you could use as many blankets in Ballarat on a spring or autumn night as you would in a frozen American winter. Thomas was thankful for the advice, and felt nothing but sympathy for the 99 out of 100 people who had but two blankets to sleep on under and over. Those who were lucky enough to tap a vein that winter went straight to the waiting Wathaurung and bought a possum skin cloak.
Charles Evans, never one to whinge, was compelled to note the frigid conditions. He woke each morning half perished with cold and was amazed to find ice crusting the drinking water in his buckets. Once that was thawed, mobility provided the next test of physical and mental endurance. To pass from one part of the diggings to another, wrote the Ballarat correspondent to the GEELONG ADVERTISER,
requires the combined characteristics of a water rat and a steam engine; for when the gullies and flats are not actually covered with water, they are so deep with mud as to require more than ordinary strength to make across them in safety.1
Thomas Pierson, who seemed never to stop whingeing, recorded in his diary that 25 June 1854 was the grimmest day since his family of three had arrived eighteen months ago. A strong, damp wind and cold as could be without freezing, wrote Thomas. He had just cause for his crabbiness. Incessant rains, Police Magistrate John D’Ewes later recalled of Ballarat’s winter of ’54, a raw cold atmosphere and unfathomable mud.
The fair-weather campers left. Forty-four-year-old Ellen Young, ensconced on Golden Point since the spring of 1852, burrowed in for another cold season. She burned what wood she and her husband Frederick could cut and carry back from Black Hill. Woodcutting was a daily chore now that they were committing it in such large quantities to the sod chimney built into the rear of their tent. And it was harder to come by than when the Youngs first arrived on the fields. So many more people, and still arriving daily, fresh off the boats, despite the ugly conditions and dire predictions that Ballarat had lost its golden sheen. But the Youngs’ labour was made bearable by the remarkable fact that timber collection was an entitlement of Frederick’s mining licence. This, thought Ellen, was an enlightened idea of the commons. It was just a shame the monthly renewal fee was so high, and the penalty for non-compliance so harsh. Ellen could see the frightened, dejected look in the eyes of the men who had to choose between the thirty shillings for a valid licence (and lawful timber collection) and a loaf for their hungry children.
And this winter, Ellen was bound to concede, the whole town appeared out of sorts. Fragmented. Undone. Still manically busy, but with a haunted feeling about it. Yes, by mid-1854 everything seemed out of joint, as one journalist put it.2 Even Mother Nature appeared to have turned the tables. The rainy season was supposed to be the harvest of diggers, as James Bonwick had said in the April 1853 edition of the GOLD DIGGERS MONTHLY MAGAZINE, furnishing plenty of the water you needed for puddling and washing. But by 1854 that wasn’t the sort of operation most miners were undertaking. It was all deep lead sinking now, great long shafts yawning into the ground, and the water was a terrible menace. More than that, every miner, and every miner’s poor anxious wife, knew the water could be deadly. A shaft could fill with water faster than you could say Joe, loosening the timbers that held back the great weight of earth, engorging the hole, ruining months of backbreaking labour. Or worse, drowning the poor wretch whose turn it was to bucket. If eight men were in the digging party and each of those men had three children, that was two dozen bairns who would go hungry. Hence the endless bucketing, day and night, night and day, to keep the shafts clear.
Water was supposed to be the key, not the lock. The water, after all, wrote Bonwick, is the true philosopher’s stone; for by its touch the gold is brought to view. But Ellen Young was a perceptive woman, as well as an educated one, and she knew if there was a real alchemical substance, an elixir of life that could turn base survival into blissful perfection, it was not water or gold, but bread.
Ellen Young is the closest thing Australia has to a Madame de Staël. Like the literary matriarch of the French Revolution, Ellen was a woman of keen intellect who used the power of her pen to rally popular forces in a period of upheaval. Her influence was local, not international like de Staël’s, yet she played a crucial role in an event that has come to hold national significance as a key political turning point.
Ellen Francis Warboys was born in Hampshire in 1810. In 1837, she married Frederick Young, probably in St James Anglican Church on the Clerkenwell Green. At twenty-seven, Ellen was two years older than her new husband, who was a chemist by trade. We know little about the Youngs’ early life together, beyond their marriage in Clerkenwell. This was an area of central London famous for its long association with radicalism, from the anticlerical Lollards of the English Reformation to the mid-nineteenth-century Chartists—and beyond, to the Marxists of the early twentieth century. (We can possibly infer from their choice of parish church that the Youngs were politically progressive, as we might deduce about someone who lives in Newtown or Fitzroy in modern Australia.)
Census data for 1841 shows Ellen and Frederick living in Shoreditch, another central London location, where an extensive network of Warboys kin also resided. The Youngs lived with Frederick’s mother and sister. Frederick arrived in Victoria on 3 April 1851, prior to the discovery of gold, and Ellen followed two years later, debarking at Geelong on 11 July 1853. The reunited couple travelled in February 1854 to Ballarat, where Frederick became a digger. Many years later he returned to his vocation as a chemist and became the first mayor of Ballarat East.
Ellen was a prolific poet who transcribed her lifetime’s works (she wrote the first poem aged thirteen) into a 175-page hardbound volume with marbled endpapers in May 1870, two years before her death in Ballarat at the age of sixty-two. The book was donated to the Ballarat Library in 1911 and remains there today, in excellent condition, neither treasured nor forgotten.
The body of work reveals many things: Ellen was classically tutored in literature, history and theology; she was pious, fashionably hyper-sentimental and proud of her English heritage; she was deeply in love with her husband, whom she variously refers to as my lover or my mentor. She was passionately connected to both the inner world of the heart and the exterior world of public affairs. And she once had a beloved son named Arthur. In the volume’s first poem, ‘Smiles and Tears’, Ellen writes: My heart oppress’d, smoking with grief/For pleasing Poesy sought relief. An Arthur Young died in St Pancras, just
round the corner from Clerkenwell, in 1850. Like digger on his long rough road/I cannot cast my useless load, wrote Ellen many years later. It seems Ellen put an ocean between herself and her misfortune, but could never escape this anguish.3
Ellen Young’s earliest published poem appeared in the GEELONG ADVERTISER on the first day of the winter of 1854. She had written it the previous week, caught in the maelstrom of a flood. At the height of the storm, Ellen later recalled, she secured her mattress from danger and then her spleen evaporated into her first truly political poem. Published as ‘Ballarat’ (but transcribed into her volume as ‘A Digger’s Lament’), the poem is a sixteen-stanza commentary on the miserable living conditions and depressed emotions of a community crushed under the weight of high expectations and disappointment. It begins ominously:
If you’ve not been to Ballarat
Then stay away from there;
I would not have my worst foe’s cat
To have such sorry fare.
Ellen described the poor state of the roads, the lack of fresh food, the famine prices, the infinite mud, the futility of complaining to the resident commissioners, the apocryphal gold and the burdensome memories of times and places past. She was trapped, they were all trapped, caught between the distant rock of ‘home’ and a hard place of ceaseless toil. The gold I promised still is hid; The past is all a sham, wrote Ellen of the dark corner of hopelessness into which the diggers were wedged. (Raffaello Carboni would later come up with his own version of this truth, much quoted by historians since. This Ballarat, he wrote, a Nugety Eldorado for the few, a ruinous field of hard labour for many, a profound ditch of Perdition for Body and Soul to all.) There they are, ’mid crowds from many climes (said Ellen), bogged in a culvert, stuck in a rut, the wheels desperately spinning.
Mid-stream, Ellen’s ‘Ballarat’ begins to take on a more righteous air, throwing off the soppiness of mem’ries craved and how her heart heaves in her breast. It’s indignation she summons now, taking offence at the insult of the situation:
The floods were out, the mail-man drunk,
What matter the delay?
That though the hearts of many sunk—
They’re diggers! Who are they?…
They’re men—high tax’d, ill log’d, worse fed
Of strong and stalwart frame
Better was ne’er by hero led
Or earn’d a hero’s name.
Suddenly, Ellen has introduced a new element into public discourse about the diggings. A sense of grievance. An air of affront. A polarising of the forces of good and evil through the positioning of heroes against villains.
It was a position that would increasingly be taken up by other organs of public opinion in the spring of ’54. The GEELONG ADVERTISER did not begin to echo Ellen’s sentiments until 27 September, when it represented the diggers as hard-working, taxed, unrepresented members of the body politic, hamstrung by absurd, insulting regulations. Ellen Young was at the crest of an inexorable wave of grievance. Or perhaps, to use another watery metaphor, she had unplugged the dyke that held back public fury.
Forty-four years old, Ellen was a senior citizen, a community elder. All of the leaders who would later emerge in the popular uprising were younger: in 1854, Peter Lalor was twenty-seven, Raffaello Carboni—the acclaimed scribe of Eureka, whose work did not appear until December 1855—was thirty-seven, and John Basson Humffray, who would later sit in parliament with Lalor, was thirty. Timothy Hayes, Anastasia’s husband, was thirty-four. Like the counter-culture revolution of more than a century later, the mounting wave of protest on the Ballarat diggings was a youth movement.4
In Ballarat, Ellen adopted the tone of a civic Mother Lion, defending the integrity of her valiant cubs. No one disputed her authority or right to become the mouthpiece for the people of Ballarat. In fact she was actively encouraged by Henry Seekamp, the twenty-five-year-old editor of the new BALLARAT TIMES, which first went to print in March 1854. Henry published Ellen’s increasingly political poems and strident letters to the editor in the spring of 1854. Unlike later Australian female writers with a critical edge and a finger on the public pulse, Ellen didn’t write anonymously.5 Rather, she flamboyantly ruffled her feathers and published as Ellen F Young, the Ballarat Poetess.6
Henry Seekamp may have been encouraged to publish Ellen’s work by his common-law wife, Clara Du Val Seekamp, who was herself something of a firebrand. As we have seen, Irish-born Clara arrived in Victoria in May 1853 on the Marco Polo, with two of her three young children. By early 1854 she had hooked up with German-born Henry Seekamp, ten years her junior, and taken his name, though there is no record of their marriage. It appears to have been a meeting of minds between Clara and the passionate young journalist. Years later she said of her young husband: if he’s sinned, it was with the single-minded aim of bettering the people.7
The BALLARAT TIMES—a voice for the beleaguered people—was run out of the Seekamps’ home on Bakery Hill. It was a financial success: within a year the Seekamps would buy all the land surrounding their little timber shack, including the houses and tents upon it, to establish a veritable compound. One house was used for the printing office, and there was a separate residence, a kitchen, a coach house, stables and a detached office. Though the relationship would not be as successful as the business enterprise, Clara would defend her (estranged) husband’s role in Ballarat’s history for the rest of her long life. She had good reason to perpetuate the BALLARAT TIMES’s legacy. By New Year’s Day 1855, she would be its editor.
In the winter of 1854, a profound movement of communal disaffection mushroomed in the damp, putrid fields of Ballarat. Under Ellen Young’s matriarchal tutelage, distrust of authority and collective grievance started to generate broader political debate about the big-ticket items of poverty, land reform, health and economic management—not to mention the whole damned notion of British justice.
Chief among the complaints of the goldfields polity was poverty: crushing, irrefutable, seemingly irredeemable poverty. Thomas Pierson wrote that in Ballarat he had seen examples of great wealth but few other places could produce the same amount of destitution poverty and want. Thomas Mundy, who carted illegal alcohol to the diggings rather than dig himself, saw it every day. People arrived at the goldfields with a few shillings or no money at all. They pitched their eight foot by six calico tent thinking to pick up gold as soon as they land. The result for forty-nine out of fifty of them? What privations the most of them had to go through, Mundy wrote, hard living, hard lodging, bad drinking water [which] often brings on Colonial fever or dysentery. Average weekly earnings on the Ballarat goldfield in 1854 were £1-13-9 (not quite thirty-four shillings). When a bag of flour cost £14, a loaf of bread 4 shillings, rice 1s per pound, sugar 9s, butter 4s, and brandy or gin 8s per pint—not to mention the monthly licence fee of 30s—there was clearly no fat (or fibre) in a family’s weekly rations.8
Jane McCracken wrote home to her mother that for every family that did well in the colony, two or three did not. I have felt more truly sorry for people here than ever I did at home, confessed Jane. Poverty has always been a women’s issue. In the French uprising of 1871, wrote historian Edith Thomas, les petroleuses, the incendiary women, literally torched Paris in rage and despair at their devastating penury and the exorbitant price of bread.
Jane McCracken’s personal sympathy highlights another problem: the lack of help for those in need. No one seems to care for the poor immigrant, good or bad, body or soul, echoed Crown Land Commissioner C. Rudston Read. The goldfields were still a frontier: no hospitals, no benevolent institutions funded by the state or friendly societies. Everything was still too new and raw and mobile and undone for that. There was not even an almshouse. Martha Clendinning would help establish the Ballarat Female Refuge in 1867, but in 1854, welfare was a matter of individual goodwill extended by kin if you had any, friends if you had made some or shipmates if you could track them down.
In this unfinished part of the world, w
rote twenty-two-year-old Noah Dalway in a letter home to his mother in Ireland, it is now that I feel the loss of you all and of a home where, had I been what was required of a son, I might now be happy in that home without any care anxiety or laborious work, all of which are now my only companions.9 Wasn’t the El Dorado of the South meant to put an end to care, anxiety and unrewarding toil? This Australia, dear mother, is most falsely represented, Noah declared in 1854, after months on the goldfields. So many thousands, what are they doing, barely making a living. According to Noah, only men of capital who could start their own line of business had any guarantee of raising themselves out of destitution. I often grieve, he said, to think that I have not as much as a £5 note to call my own and to send you some.
Harry Hastings Pearce’s grandmother lived on the Creswick Creek diggings, twenty miles from Ballarat, in the 1850s. Later she would tell her family that the number one cause of all the trouble in the summer of ’54 was poverty. William Howitt reckoned that the diggers were primarily aggrieved by false accounts of the richness of the diggings and the ease of procuring gold, followed closely by the exorbitant price of food. But the arbitrary nature of gold mining, and Ballarat’s particular palaeo-geology, meant that not everyone was starving. A quick glance at the advertisements in the BALLARAT TIMES would still show that while some families couldn’t afford bread, others were dining on potted pheasant and imported jellies. If my neighbour could eat like a king, why not I?
Those who made their fortunes often packed their bags and went home triumphant. But for the majority who had failed, there was not even enough loose change for a coach ride to Geelong, let alone a passage to Britain. To many, there seemed an obvious solution. If gold digging was so futile, why not farm the millions of acres of Crown land that surrounded the goldfields? Till the virgin soil. On the land, people imagined, there could be an end to the restless pursuit of fortune and an acceptance of a modest livelihood of rural toil. It’s where many immigrants had started their journeys, after all.