by Clare Wright
Trouble.
There are few traces of Mrs Catherine McLister other than the transcripts of her day in court and her death certificate, which reveals that she died during the birth of her first child, James, in March 1858 in Geelong. By this time, Robert McLister’s profession was listed as gold digger, indicating that his wife’s principled action may have cost him his job.15 Catherine had suffered from consumption for over four years and the official cause of her death was phthisis larengis, throat lesions caused by acute tuberculosis. Baby James died of debility eleven days later. It’s unclear why Catherine and Robert chose to migrate to Victoria (her health? his career? the recent deaths of her father and sister?), whether her upbringing in County Donegal nurtured an insubordinate spirit or how a well-heeled woman felt about living in a windblown tent at the arse-end of the colonial world. But there is no doubt that Catherine’s official complaint was a radical act of disclosure: her way of saying look at this.
There are many unanswered questions around Catherine’s courageous decision to haul a police inspector before a judicial board. But the case clearly demonstrates two important points. First, her vocal opposition to being manhandled by Evans shows that while the Camp may have been a bastion of power and privilege—male privilege—it was not an exclusively male domain. It was a civil base camp-cum-garrison that housed women alongside their partners. They walked its muddy corridors, slept under its canvas ceilings, serviced its masters and provided corporeal fodder for the fantasies and responsibilities of men. Catherine’s presence lends another perspective to the mood and motivation of the Camp when faced with threats of attack from the rebellious digging population. Yes, the Camp represented an ancien regime sandbagging itself against the tides of democratic change: the Camp was ‘The Man’, and the diggers and storekeepers believed it was time to stick it to The Man. But the Camp was also an isolated and physically vulnerable outpost of imperial authority, in which husbands daily feared for the safety of their wives and children. Both from enemies without, and, it appears, from within. The presence of women at the Camp restores some of the humanity to the men on the offensive side of the Stockade, even crude bullies like Evans.16
Second, in witnessing the power struggles in a gendered world, we come to realise that the Camp was not a unified, harmonious entity—as its cosily inclusive label might suggest. The battles being fought on the Ballarat diggings were not so black and white as the conventional ‘miners versus military’ line-up implies. Rather, tensions around ethnicity, rank and sex fuelled internal resentments, even while, as Samuel Huyghue described, the commissioners maintained an aristocratic and exclusive front, tricked out in scraps of braid and gold lace…and often redolent of perfume…faithful to the prescriptions of caste. Once the crack appears—and Catherine McLister’s public defiance of abusive relationships of authority constitutes such a fissure—we can begin to prise open the surprisingly brittle front of goldfields officialdom.
If Chief Commissioner McMahon in Melbourne could see the writing on the tatty canvas walls, he should have paid heed to just one line in the barrage of correspondence issuing from the Camp. On 25 September, Captain Evans warned I have not accommodation beyond my own complement of men for any emergency that may arise. Three weeks later Bentley’s Hotel was a pile of cinders and the whole miserable, maudlin, mutinous Camp was under siege. Or, more precisely, it was in the grip of a siege mentality, as not a single stone had yet been hurled in the Camp’s direction. But the mere scent of a digger revolt rising up from the Flat, compounded by internal chaos, was enough to frighten the horses.
On 24 October, a company of twenty-eight mounted troops from the 40th Regiment arrived in Ballarat, led by the veteran warrior Captain Thomas. Four days later, two more companies, one from the 40th, one from the 12th Regiment, marched from Melbourne to the already swollen Camp. Defending the Camp meant strengthening its numbers. By the month’s end, there were over 260 members of the military concertinaed into a few rows of ragged tents. The population of the Camp had tripled in a matter of weeks.
As the pre-summer temperature began to climb, so the pressure of living cheek by jowl intensified. The whole situation is reminiscent of that classic scene from the Marx Brothers movie A Night at the Opera, when the stowaway Groucho is hiding in a tiny ship’s bolthole. People keep knocking on his door—a porter, a maid, another Marx brother—and he stuffs them into his cabin like sardines. Make that two, no, make that three hard boiled eggs, he says to the waiter outside the door, trying to keep up with the swelling numbers. Critical mass is finally reached, and when a newcomer opens the door, the whole heaving contingent spews out in a flume of cascading bodies and luggage and lunch.
High camp.
ELEVEN
CROSSING THE LINE (REPRISE)
November. There is no turning back the clock of 1854. Whatever aspirations you might have had for this bright year either have been happily realised or are about to become history in the headlong rush towards Yuletide. It’s still hard to fathom that your Christmas dinner will be consumed under the blaze of the southern sun, with these desiccated trees shedding their lizard-skin bark and the green of mistletoe replaced by dung-brown grasses that spit and fizz if they catch a wayward ember. You know bushfire is a steadfast threat. An inferno sped through this time last year, leaving its wake of black char here. And then, just like that, so soon, new green shoots like a graveyard of insolent asparagus. There are clouds of dust in place of the snowy blanket that enveloped your childhood Christmases.
Perhaps, like young Scotsman Alexander Dick, you have just travelled the road to Ballarat and arrived at this place, with its electric crackle of anticipation and agitation. A very mutinous and excited spirit prevalent, wrote Alexander in his diary after walking from Geelong and pitching his tent on the Eureka Lead, ripe for an explosion. It makes you tingle with a delicious shiver of hope and dread.
Or perhaps you thought you’d be long gone by now, sailed back over the seas, back home, transformed, triumphant. It would make you cry, then, to think of another long year of fruitless toil and bottomless yearning, earning not even enough for a ticket home. Or perhaps you are one of the many who found a mate this spring and got spliced; the new year will bring your first child.
One thing is certain. The time has passed to wait submissively, to wait and see whether the intimations and pleas and petitions and letters and now, since Bentley’s, the explosive grass fires of public protest will nudge a mulish government over the line of reform. The time has come to take command of events. The time has come to harness the energies of an agitated and anxious multitude and steer them towards an early resolution.
In a poem called ‘The Wise Resolve’ that Ellen Young published in the BALLARAT TIMES, she put words in the mouth of a hypothetically redeemed Governor Hotham:
Those lubberly boys—vagabond diggers—
Toil all day, like so many niggers;
Like niggers I’ll drive them, and force them to do
Whatever I choose, or have mind to do…[But]
As there’s among them doctors and tailors,
Parsons and clerks, there’s sure to be sailors
Tell them to pipe hands and choose their own crew,
Their rights to protect, as freemen should do.1
Time to choose your own crew. Time for the Pollywogs to take over the ship. Time to cross the line.
If you’re going to draw a line the question will inevitably arise: which side are you on?
Sarah Hanmer was among the first of Ballarat’s prominent citizens to nail her colours to the mast. After the arrests of Andrew McIntyre and Thomas Fletcher for the burning of the Bentleys’ hotel, a ‘monster meeting’ was called for 22 October. Over ten thousand people gathered at Bakery Hill to hear thirty-year-old John Basson Humffray, twenty-four-year-old Henry Holyoake and twenty-seven-year-old Thomas Kennedy—all men with Chartist connections—deliver rousing speeches about the infringement of rights daily occurring at Ballarat. We are worse of
f than either Russian serf or American slave!! was how the BALLARAT TIMES framed the problem. Nothing short of the removal of the Camp officials who so flagrantly abused their offices would resolve the matter. The speakers called on the government to muck out their own stables before the people of Ballarat were forced to make a clean sweep themselves.
The ashes of the Eureka Hotel fire lay as unadorned proof of the might of the people if justice was denied them. But still, at this stage, the TIMES predicted that the collective angst would settle down into a quiet constitutional agitation, argued with moral not physical force, and fought on the twin issues of taxation and representation.2 A Diggers Rights Society was thereby established to keep the Camp honest, and Holyoake called for subscriptions to help pay for the legal defence of McIntyre and Fletcher.
It was behind this cause, the Diggers Defence Fund, that Sarah Hanmer threw her considerable energies. She announced a benefit to be held at the Adelphi Theatre on 26 October. At the end of the monster meeting three cheers were raised for the recently defunct GOLD DIGGERS’ ADVOCATE to be re-established; three groans were given for the turncoat ARGUS; and three cheers and one more for the kindness of Mrs Hanmer for her benefit at the Adelphi.3 Sarah’s theatre had earned the status of the Fifth Estate. The printing presses at Clara Seekamp’s home might be giving voice to the people, but Sarah Hanmer’s business was providing the stage for action as well as filling the war chest.
Apart from natural justice, there was another reason to give financial succour to those arbitrarily fingered for the Eureka Hotel fire. McIntyre’s twenty-six-year-old wife, Christina, was heavily pregnant with their second child. This fact has never before been revealed, yet it is an important piece of evidence in that McIntyre’s family situation would have been germane to the communal outrage over his arrest. It was common practice—almost a point of honour—for diggers to rally around the impoverished wife of a fellow miner after he was gaoled for being unlicensed.
Andrew McIntyre and Christina (née Winton) arrived in Victoria from their native Scotland on the Success in 1852. Their first child, James, was born at sea. By October 1854, Christina was seven months pregnant with their son Thomas, who would be born on 15 February. With her twenty-five-year-old husband committed for trial on 6 November in Geelong, Christina was left alone with her troubles. To add insult to injury, many people believed Andrew McIntyre was one of the few present at the riot who was actually trying to save the hotel property and its inhabitants. Even Assistant Commissioner Amos, who was stationed at Eureka and knew its diggers better than anyone, testified in McIntyre’s defence.
Thomas Kennedy, who spoke at the monster meeting, was himself married with four children. And John ‘Yorkey’ Westoby, tried along with McIntyre and Fletcher, would be married to his sweetheart Margaret Stewart in 1855. Thomas Fletcher, twenty-five, was a single man, but he was intimately connected with the social and commercial world of Ballarat. By late 1854, Fletcher had, with Charles and George Evans, established the Criterion Printing Office located opposite the Adelphi Theatre. As well as printing all Sarah Hanmer’s playbills, the Criterion was also responsible for producing the posters for the monster meetings on Bakery Hill. Significantly, these posters rallied together the diggers, storekeepers and inhabitants of Ballarat generally. We, the people.
Fletcher, wrote Charles Evans in his diary, is about the last man I should have thought likely to take part in such a proceeding and besides this I knew from several circumstances that he was like myself nothing more than a passive spectator. The arbitrary nature of the arrests left the thousands of bystanders with a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god shudder.
The Eureka population was starting to coalesce around its sense of grievance and Sarah Hanmer had the capital, resources and heart to mobilise the community. Christina McIntyre reaped the advantage of this unwritten social contract in a way that Catherine Bentley, who was also pregnant with a toddler, and now homeless to boot, would not. Catherine had, according to popular assumption, crossed the line to the dark side: to bureaucratic corruption and its attendent privileges. In the moral economy of gold seeking, this would not do. It was acceptable to get rich through hard work and luck, but not through graft and influence.
At the Adelphi, Sarah hung out her star-spangled flag for the disenfranchised miners. Her benefit for the Diggers Defence Fund was a corker. The event was of literally great benefit to the fund, reported the GEELONG ADVERTISER, Mrs Hanmer’s liberality and characteristic style of acting in the piece of the evening (The Stranger) which she had made her own, were fully appreciated.4 On a hot and sultry night, the same night that reinforcements from the 40th Regiment rolled into town, Sarah and her troupe played to a respectable and crowded house. Charles Evans was present and noted the animating effect the event had on the community. Mrs Hanmer, Charles wrote,
gave up her theatre for their benefit and The Stranger was performed to a crowded house, and in fact throughout the diggings there seemed to be but one feeling, a warm sympathy for Fletcher & McIntyre and deep indignation at the conduct of the Authorities.
Sarah’s benefit raised over £70. The success of the event, and no doubt the amount of press it garnered, prompted other theatre managers—Mr Hetherington at the Royal and Mr Clarke at the Queen’s—to quickly follow suit. Sarah Hanmer held several more benefits for the diggers’ cause during November. By the time it was all over, she had contributed more money to the popular rights movement than any other citizen.
If the crew up at the Camp had been on their game instead of worrying over the cut of their trousers, they would have been keeping a close eye on the Adelphi and its high-flying prima donna. Back in August, a seemingly routine event occurred that would have a lasting effect on the future of Ballarat’s power dynamics. Frank Carey, a twenty-four-year-old boarding-house keeper from Orange County, New York, was arrested on a sly-grog charge. Carey was tried at the Ballarat Petty Sessions court on 25 August for selling spirituous liquors without a licence at his Excelsior Boarding House, and fined £50. Nothing unusual there. Then Carey was charged again on 18 September. Rumour had it that Carey had been framed by the roundly detested Police Sergeant Major Robert Milne. For his second offence, Carey received a sentence of six months in the vermin-infested Ballarat lockup.
Now there was outrage. Seventeen hundred people signed a petition praying for executive clemency in the case, on the grounds that there had been no violation in the second instance. The petition was signed by all of the ten boarders at the Excelsior, including Henry Holyoake, Robert Burnett and A. W. Arnold. The petitioners claimed that Carey was an upstanding, law-abiding fellow whose house had never been the scene of any disorderly or riotous conduct whatsoever.5 Why, the only thing out of the ordinary at Mr Carey’s house was his nigger cook. And even that wasn’t so exceptional. Charles and George Evans also employed a white-haired old Aboriginal fellow to prepare their meals
What is noteworthy about the petition, apart from the huge number of signatories, is the fact that it was almost certainly written by a woman—Mary Stevens. Again, this is information that has never before come to light, though it’s not difficult to deduce, since Mary’s careful handwriting tops the list of signatures. But who was Mary Stevens? Both she and A. W. Arnold were employed at the Adelphi Theatre: they were actors, noted for their fine performances in Sarah Hanmer’s productions. Arnold was also a witness to the burning of Bentley’s Hotel, and Robert Burnett, a fellow American working as a barber, has been credited as the man who fired the first shot in the ‘Ballarat War’.6 It’s unclear whether Mary Stevens and the incarcerated Frank Carey were in a romantic relationship when Mary took it upon herself to orchestrate his liberation. If they were, it didn’t last. Frank Carey married nineteen-year-old German-born immigrant Dorette Hahn in 1855. Their only child, Francis, was born in September 1856, by which stage Carey was a fully licensed hotelkeeper.
Any government spy worth his salt would have realised that the Adelphi Hotel had become the primary nucleus
of radicalism over the winter of 1854. Digger activists could gripe and moan and rally and plot and plan in the open air, around their shafts or the campfire at night, but rabble-rousing was warmer, drier and less susceptible to pricked ears within the confines of a spacious tent-cum-theatre guarded by a trustworthy collaborator. The Adelphi was a safe house, presided over by Mrs Hanmer, a respectable widow and acclaimed theatrical manager. She provided a refuge for the disaffected, with whose cause she clearly sympathised. After Carey was arrested the second time, Mrs Hanmer gave a benefit to raise funds for his release. While the Jews of Ballarat kvetched and prayed at the Clarendon Hotel (it was there they formed a minyan prior to the erection of the first synagogue in 1861), the Germans drank and caroused at the Wiesenhavern Brothers’ Prince Albert Hotel on Bakery Hill and the Irish centred their activities at Father Smyth’s St Alipius tent church, Mrs Hanmer presented the Americans with a velvet-curtained front. Another of Sarah’s actors, Frank D’Amari, later attested that most of the principal players in bringing justice to Bentley were Americans.7 It was the Americans, he said, who called for Bentley’s lynching.
But here was the crucial rub. The American community of Victoria formed a large and prosperous class of merchants and entrepreneurs. In January 1854, Freeman Cobb, John Murray Peck, John Lamber and James Swanton established the American Telegraph Line of Coaches, later to be known as Cobb and Co. The company ran coaches that linked all the major goldfields with Melbourne and with each other. This transport network was crucial to pastoral and commercial expansion in Victoria. In Melbourne, George Francis Train, Henry Nicholls and others were presiding over prosperous mercantile businesses with links to large international financiers. Train was the major backer of Cobb and Co. as well as the Australian correspondent to the BOSTON GLOBE. A goldfields fracas involving an American citizen, then, was a tricky affair: a delicate balancing act of diplomacy between local affairs and the bigger picture of American influence. And it was for this reason that twenty-one-year-old Mary Stevens’ petition, with its lengthy trail of signatures, went straight to the top of the government’s in-tray.