‘Good evening, Mr Richard!’ says the journalist, ‘What luck today?’
‘Well, I don’t know, come and look, here it is,’ the digger replies, pouring the water from the pannikin to show the thin scattering of gold at the bottom.
‘How much do you say?’
‘Well, I don’t know, shall I say two ounces and a half?’
‘Don’t say too much - suppose you state two and a quarter, and then you’ll be within the mark.’
‘Be it so,’ replies Clarke. ‘I want but the truth.’39
And so it goes. The next tent has a party of six who, after three days’ labour, also have two ounces and a quarter of gold to boast of. The next one along, with four men, after three and a half days, have five ounces and a quarter. The next, a party of four, after two days’ work, an ounce and a half. The last party of three, after a day and a half, has just an ounce.
In sum, such pickings for such work are only okay … and beyond those who actually have found gold, there are many others whose only reward has been blistered hands, aching backs and severely depleted savings. They had hoped for El Dorado and found very little indeed. And so Clarke now chooses his words carefully to fulfil his duty to his readers, to be their man on the ground, writing, ‘And now one word before closing this despatch would advise all parties who have comfortable situations to stay at home, and “let well alone,” make no sacrifices of the present for the future, but patiently await the result of the present experiments … I say wait awhile, rush not rashly to the christening of the gold-birth - there will be plenty without you at its baptism, and your time will be to celebrate its maturity … My last word is, “pause! before you plunge.”’40
And yet for those diggers who have already plunged, the abiding sense is that there must be gold in heavier concentrations in these parts. But where?
So it is that, just like dingos looking for easy meat, many of the disappointed diggers follow the creeks and gullies that spread out from Clunes and Buninyong in all directions until …
Until, on this 21st day of August, a 26-year-old Irishman by the name of James Regan finds himself making his way back from the Clunes diggings that he has been checking out to Buninyong, where he has been based with his 75-year-old friend, John Dunlop, a one-time dashing cavalry officer at the Battle of Waterloo. Regan’s course takes him heading down a muddy gully and through the shadowy glades until he emerges onto the grassy slopes leading down into the valley they call ‘Ballaarat’. This is heavily worked squatting country, a place within a fifteen mile radius of where William Yuille had first established himself and where there are now some 20 stations. An English visitor to the area a decade earlier had noted in his diary, ‘What would the poor farmers at home think of having 150 and 300 square miles of excellent grazing or pasture land for PS10 per annum?’41
Not that Regan cares about that! For now he comes to a nice ‘gravelly slope with quartz boulders’,42 a little to the south of a heavily timbered and curiously dome-like hill on the northern end of Yuille’s run. This’ll do …
In his first attempt, he first takes a shovelful of soil from the slope before taking it to a nearby creek for some gentle panning and … meets all but instant success. The gold gleams in the bottom of his pan. A lot of gold. More gold in a few spades than he had been able to glean in whole hours of labouring at Buninyong … A good man, Regan quickly packs up and returns to Buninyong for John Dunlop, and the two begin searching in earnest.
Over the next few days they gather in no fewer than 104 grains of gold, weighing a very handsome four ounces - worth over PS12!
Are they entirely alone at this point? Two years later, in late 1853, Dunlop would be asked that very question by a Select Committee of the Victorian Parliament: ‘When you arrived, you were sure there was no one there?’ 43
Dunlop would be very quick with his reply, as there was absolutely no doubt at the time and he can recall it clearly: ‘No; there was no sign of anyone, only a few huts belonging to the natives.’44
25 August 1851, the Buninyong goldfields stir with revolt
If there is one thing worse than scratching just a few specks of gold around Buninyong and Clunes when you had been hoping to find fist-sized nuggets, it is hearing the news that the government expects you to pay 30 shillings a month for the privilege!
It is for that reason that the news of the Lieutenant-Governor’s proclamation hits the nascent goldfields like a storm. Thirty shillings? Thirty shillings? A pound and a half? At a time when they have no guarantees of earning anything at all? For many of the miners it is thirty shillings expenditure for what may potentially be a month of nothing. Many have spent their last capital buying picks, shovels and supplies before getting themselves up here on the expectation that they will soon find gold - in the absence of that gold, they are now stony motherless broke.45 What do you do when the government wants the value of half an ounce of gold out of you every month when you haven’t found that much?46
It is for very good reason that 1 September, the day the tax is to begin, becomes known on the fields as ‘BLACK MONDAY’.
The government’s stated reasons for the introduction of the license fees are many, but a principal one is that to properly manage goldfields and keep law and order will require an enormous effort and expense on the part of the Civil Service, and who better to pay for that than the very diggers who are incurring the cost? All of the gold, whether on private or Crown land, belongs to Her Majesty anyway, and so the men must pay for the right to dig it.
That is not the way the diggers themselves see it. They see the Lieutenant-Governor caving into the demands of the squatters. The humble workers are not free to simply up and leave their jobs to try their luck on the goldfields - they need the permission of the boss cockies first. And that goes for soldiers, sailors, police and the public service, too. For the diggers, it is nothing less than an outrage. Most of the squatters in these parts had, like Yuille, claimed their lands 15 years and more earlier, meaning that for latecomers there is no land left to lease, let alone buy - even if they had the capital to do so. Only the squatters themselves can buy farming land from the government, because, under the 1847 Gipps Regulations, once squatters had occupied the land for five years they could purchase, at a cost of just one pound an acre, no fewer than 320 acres. And now the government wants the diggers to pay 30 shillings a month for merely the right to dig on an infinitesimally smaller patch of ground? For many diggers it reminds them of the appalling governments in Europe they have left behind.
At least, however, the outraged diggers have the support of many of the gentlemen of the press. As ever, Alfred Clarke is on top of the issue and fully on the diggers’ side, sending a dispatch back to his paper, the Geelong Advertiser, before it is subsequently reprinted in The Argus:
‘Thirty shillings a month, for twenty-six days’ work, payable in advance, is the impost demanded by our Victorian Czar. Eighteen pounds sterling per annum, per head, is the merciless prospective exaction on an enterprise scarcely fourteen days old. It is a juggernaut tax to crush the poor, and if attempted against the richer and more powerful parts of the community, would be fatal to the domination that is, and La Trobism in one twelvemonth would be spoken of in the past tense. Why should a lawful occupation, promising so much, be strangled at its birth? I say unhesitatingly, fearlessly, and conscientiously, that there has not been a more gross attempt at injustice since the days of Wat Tyler; it is an insult to common sense, and if passed bye, by the journals of Port Phillip, without strict comment, it will be an indelible stain upon them. If such a thing as this tax be tolerated, it will be the first step to liberticide, for liberty cannot be where the foundation of all wealth is trammelled …
‘It is hinted that a meeting of the diggers will take place, this afternoon, to consider upon the above question of the Gold Licenses.’47
And that meeting, a gathering of some 40 to 50 diggers, does indeed take place on the Buninyong diggings as miner after miner steps u
p to tell his story and express his views. One in particular who is warmly applauded lays it on the line from the first.
‘I am a free man,’ he says, ‘and a hard-working man, willing to pay my fair share to the government, but I cannot and will not pay thirty shillings a month for a license.’48
The next man reports that, just to get to the diggings and buy the equipment he needed, ‘[I have] spent every halfpenny … and now I am to be taxed before I have been here a week, or had the opportunity of getting any of it back again’.
It is not right!
Another says he couldn’t even scrape together enough to ‘pay a shilling a day’ to the commissioner, while a man who had been to California for their gold rush says, ‘The Yankees don’t do it in this here fashion.’49
All 50 of them agree that there has to be a better way of raising money and so pass a resolution calling on the government to withdraw the tax.
27 August 1851, Ballarat receives visitors
How can Dunlop and Regan keep the good pickings at Ballarat to themselves? It is impossible. Far from being pioneers a long way out on their own, they are no more than the vanguard of a whole swarm of other prospectors who, disappointed by the yield at both Clunes and Buninyong, are also looking elsewhere. In short, the same force that has propelled Regan and Dunlop to this golden point is also propelling everyone else with a pick, a shovel and hope in his heart - meaning that within just a few days several other groups have arrived and they, too, meet immediate success. Some of them even begin to find good-sized nuggets.
The whole situation is still manageable - for there is plenty of gold for everyone - just so long as the general word doesn’t get out so that a real rush to this spot begins. But, of course, it cannot last.
Alfred Clarke is not long in hearing of the diggings at Ballarat and, in the company of a digger he has fallen in with at Buninyong, William Brownhill, has come to investigate. They head down the gully in the last few days of August to find Dunlop and Regan there, going strong, together with half a dozen other parties, now digging into the side of the hill and washing the result in the creek.
If the new arrivals are delighted to see how well it is all clearly going and pleased to be here, the reception they receive is not commensurately warm. Regan, his wealth growing by the hour and eager to keep the numbers down, looks up from a dish in which small pieces of gold are gleaming to see the friendly reporter from the Geelong Advertiser beaming down upon him - and he is shattered.
‘I would rather have seen the devil than him,’50 he would later record of his thoughts at the time.
Brownhill’s welcome is equally unprepossessing. When he begins to follow the diggers’ example, he is firmly told that this side of the hill is taken and he must go elsewhere. Reluctantly, Brownhill heads for the other side of the hill that, unfortunately for him, will soon become known as ‘Poverty Point’. But, of course, this notion of ‘our side of the hill’ simply cannot last as the weight of numbers increases by the day, and then by the hour.
On 28 August, an old campaigner by the name of Henry Hennington turns up and, instead of merely scratching the surface as the others have been doing, actually sinks a small shaft on a spot on the slope where he has found some promising gold specks in the grass. And there they are, like a bunch of golden grapes, good-sized nuggets ‘all over the bottom like a jeweller’s shop’.51
Not long afterwards, Hennington digs another hole in a different spot, this one ten feet deep, and is rewarded once more with a similar crop of golden grapes. It is on the strength of such finds that this area at Ballarat becomes known as ‘Golden Point’ - a small hill so rich in alluvial gold, on or near the surface, that you can barely miss. Just start digging! And so the men do, pulling out ever more gold. And there, still recording it all, is the beaming face of Alfred Clarke, his trusty pencil scratching ever more copious notes in his notebook.
What a story! Even if suddenly the rain is tumbling down as never before. He starts to race back to Buninyong regardless, to write his report. ‘I had a creek running down my vertebrae, a lagoon in each boot and a waterhole in my hat,’ he would later say of this trip. ‘I was in excellent condition for cradling.’52
In short order, his report is on its way to Geelong, secured in the satchel of a horseman heading that way …
Mid-September 1851, Melbourne goes mad
Since the time that gold has been discovered, all of Melbourne and much of the colony appear to have lost its senses. Government work, much of it reliant on contractors, is at a standstill. For anyone with get-up-and-go has already got-up-and-gone. Labourers, louts and lawyers, farmers and foundry workers, mechanics and magistrates - they all form part of a human tide moving from Melbourne and Geelong to the diggings, scouring the land as they go, looking for supplies that might help. At Geelong, a man is brought to a halt by an outraged priest, convinced that the cradle on the man’s back was only a short time before his bloomin’ pulpit!
Among the many other problems this gold fever engenders is the continued loss of labour from the worthy pursuits of agriculture, all at a time when the wool shearing season is drawing nigh. After the squatters have suffered the colossal indignity of seeing swarms of these diggers infesting the land that they rightly have leasehold over, they now must bear the humiliation of seeing their own workers abandoning their posts to join the swarm!
Are the squatters really expected to shear the sheep, herd the cattle and harvest the wheat themselves? There will soon be a lot more work to do and no pastoral workers left to do it. In panic, some squatters have already sold up and left their runs because they simply cannot work them without men.
Yes, it has really come to that! In Melbourne you can no longer get a cab unless you are a digger, in part because they give the biggest tips, even for the smallest trips, refusing to take change on their fares. These damn diggers are out to change everything.
And it is not just the people of Melbourne who are in an uproar. Down in Hobart, the Bishop of Tasmania is reduced to paddling out to his yacht on the Derwent River every night, as this is the only way he can protect that boat from being stolen by convicts who want to go to the diggings. Things are turning upside down in that fair town. The Governor’s wife, Lady Denison, complains about a woman walking the wharves dressed in bright pink velvet for no apparent reason. Meanwhile, her husband, Sir William Denison, laments that, ‘There is no longer the division of rich and poor.’53
CHAPTER THREE
THE GOLDEN GLOBE
Generally young, shallow-brained fellows, proud of their uniform, treating the diggers overbearingly, and bringing down invectives upon the Government through its servants.1
Mrs Andrew Campbell, wife of the Ballarat police magistrate, was not flattering in her characterisation of the police on the diggings.
But with all its golden advantages, Australia has yet greater for the emigrant who prefers the comforts and decencies of life to bartering his soul for gold. In Australia, as elsewhere, Mammon carries his curse with him, and his worshippers must partake of it. Drunkenness, debauchery, crime, and immorality, in every shape, are the characteristics of such a society as is now gathering in the gold districts. There are thousands of respectable families in England whose interest it would be to emigrate, but who would not encounter such a condition for all the gold Australia contains.2
George Butler Earp, The Gold Colonies of Australia, and Gold Seeker’s Manual
2 September 1851, The Times of London reports
It is a lengthy editorial, and it appears on the fourth page of the most venerable newspaper in all of Great Britain:
AUSTRALIAN GOLD
Gold is likely to prove a drug in the market. There has been a fresh discovery of this precious metal in New South Wales. Advice recently received from Sydney inform us that gold has been discovered in large quantities at Bathurst, 150 miles from that place …
There is no inherent improbability in the report. It comes to us confirmed by the strongest
positive testimony, Australia may yet put California to shame. It is said that from the mountain ranges to an indefinite extent in the interior, the region named is one vast gold field.3
However great a stir such stories create in Britain, by now, of course, they are totally out of date, as even greater finds are afoot …
8 September 1851, The Argus breaks the news
Alfred Clarke has been having a good year of it, breaking story after story himself, and today his most important one yet is published.
THE NEW DIGGINGS BUNINYONG. THURSDAY MORNING (4 SEPTEMBER)
A prolific gold field has been discovered about seven miles from Buninyong … on Yuille’s station.
The gold found here is of virgin purity - some of the pieces are as round as a shot; others have squared sides, and some present a laminated appearance, as though subjected to extreme pressure.
Again, Geelong may cry ‘Eureka!’ for there is no doubt but that the long-sought is at length found; and ere long we shall lay claim to the appellation of the ‘Golden District’.4
And it keeps going. Within days Clarke is using that rarest of journalistic devices - capital letters - but nothing less will do to report that, ‘The news from the Gold Field is exciting … The fact of TWENTY-THREE OUNCES having been obtained by one party, on the first opening of a new “claim,” will bear comparison with any of the successes of the first Bathurst diggers.’5
And further: ‘Let me then say, that success has exceeded the expectations of the most sanguine, and that Geelong may proudly boast, without fear of contradiction, that she possesses a gold field as rich as any ever yet discovered …
‘Out of a hundred and twenty on the ground, there is not one idle hand. I never witnessed such a cheerful untiring scene of industry in my life, carried on in silence, broken only by the rocking of the cradle, or the exclamations elicited by an occasional extraordinary yield, or the upturning of a “nugget”.’6
Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution Page 10