Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  The strike wavered and collapsed for want of funds to support the miners. But when Sleath returned as hero-martyr to Broken Hill he was greeted at the Sulphide Street Railway Station by up to 2000 men, women and children, who began cheering from the time the train of the ‘prodigals had crossed Bromide Street’. Sleath and other released miners were taken in drays drawn by miners to the Theatre Royal Hotel for breakfast. Wages had fallen by 10 per cent, and the working week had been increased, but the thousands of Barrier miners dreamed of sending Sleath to Macquarie Street. Labour could not win a strike, but Labor members could win elections. A month after his release from prison, Sleath had given a speech in Wilcannia on ‘Land and Labour’, and was cheered by the audience.

  During the 1892 strike, Plorn Dickens had visited Broken Hill on his way to Sydney for a sitting of Parliament and seen the silent mines. When George Reid, a fleshy whimsical Free Trader, moved a motion to censure the strikers, Plorn told the House he had never seen men better behaved than the unionists on picket duty. Nor had he seen any aggressive police acts, he said. He praised his colleague, J.H. Cann, the Labour Member of Parliament for Bourke, and said that Cann had done as much as he could to settle ‘this unfortunate dispute’ by recommending the unions remove the pickets, since removal was one of the pre-conditions of a meeting between the mine owners and the miners’ representatives. But the union would not do so. Plorn appealed to members to put nation before party interests and vote down the motion. The motion was indeed defeated.

  But after a boundary distribution, the west was now suddenly full of Labor candidates ready to tap into the anger over the failure of the miners’ strike in Broken Hill. In 1894 Cann was to be the candidate for Broken Hill, and Sleath was selected to oppose the relatively easy target, Plorn Dickens. By 1894 several Wilcannia banks had suspended payments for the duration of the financial crisis, and citizens had at various times found themselves without ready cash for simple household needs. A number of municipal employees had been sacked, and were ripe for change. So were the shearers. On one station the manager had had to send for the police to keep the peace between those willing to work for the cut rate of 25 shillings a week and those who refused to take less than 30 shillings. Because of his genial and sympathetic attitudes, Plorn was given a warm welcome by the workers at that and other stations. But he did not have a vision of organised fraternity to present.

  In Dickens’ last speech in Parliament he made his final attack on the land laws. According to the Barrier Miner, this was no more than a poor attempt to make himself ‘solid’ with his constituency. When Parliament recessed for a new election in early 1894, a committee was formed in Wilcannia for Dickens’ re-election. In the meantime Sleath was speaking in the mining towns of White Cliffs and Tibooburra. He and Dickens coincided in their belief that there should be no further influx of ‘Asiatics’, and both candidates urged the extension of the telegraph to the remote communities. They both also advocated locks along the Darling to keep its length navigable.

  The Miner also turned Plorn’s own arguments against him, as if only Labor folk thought of the issues of the region. Broken Hill was caught between the ‘inter-colonial cut-throatism’ of South Australia and New South Wales, with South Australia regulating her railway tariff so as to make it cheaper for the mining companies to ship to Adelaide. ‘Broken Hill people suffer both ways. It is they who have to pay Customs duty if they buy South Australian goods, and it is they who have to pay carriage for the long journey by sea and land if they buy Sydney side stuff.’ There were no inducements and no reduction in costs from New South Wales—a cry Plorn had also raised in Macquarie Street. Many, though not all, remotely placed people in Australia looked, like Plorn, to Federation, for it would bring free trade between the colonies.

  The Barrier Miner concluded before the election between glamorous young Sleath and plodding Dickens that ‘labour can be transferred so rapidly from one place to another and the prosperity of one colony means prosperity to the labourers of another colony. West Australia’s prosperity improves the position of workers in New South Wales. The Labor party is therefore the only true Federal party.’

  Dickens returned home early from Parliament because of the pressure from Sleath. At his election meeting, one of his supporters, Quin, said that the new relationship between labour and capital meant that the electorate needed a moderate man. In fact the electorate was ready for a new, passionate model. As a sign of Dickens’ liberality, he had voted for the Bank Notes Bill George Dibbs’ government had legislated, decreeing that only the bank notes of four major reputable banks could be circulated, giving people certainty (Quin said) and a better deal than many Victorian depositors had got. He claimed the bill had ‘saved the country, as otherwise the storekeepers and businessmen could not carry on’. But it had created want and inconvenience in country areas, where often only small banks operated, and it was not likely that Dickens would be forgiven for it.

  At a meeting at White Cliffs, the voters passed a unanimous vote of no confidence in Dickens and ended by giving three cheers for Sleath. When Dickens rode out across desert to speak at Tibooburra, a motion was carried in the hall that he was ‘not a fit and proper person to represent the electors of Wilcannia’. In June 1894 the Barrier Miner revived the old slur that ‘the most interesting thing about you is that you are the son of Charles Dickens . . . If the theory is true, we ought not blame children born late in their parents’ life if they do not attain the brilliance of these parents at their best.’ It then estimated the size of Plorn’s inheritance from his immortal parent and drew the conclusion that he had squandered it.

  As the election drew near, the Barrier Miner mentioned that many Broken Hill miners were leaving for Western Australia, and every day that passed further batches reduced the voting power of Labor. Some correspondents believed that squatters and others were deliberately sending their station workers away to other electorates to prevent them voting Labor. On 7 April 1894 the paper gave an idea of the practical difficulties of democracy in such a huge region. The Darling had flooded and the two policemen stationed at Mount Browne had to travel through flooded country for 150 miles (240 kilometres) east and 70 miles (over 110 kilometres) west to deliver the ballot papers. Said the Miner, ‘These back country people most certainly ought not to be disenfranchised.’ Premier Dibbs, ‘the dictator of this colony and not merely the premier of it’, had nonetheless extended the election date to the end of May, but this was not long enough, said the people of western New South Wales.

  After the election, final figures were not known for a week, but it became apparent that the militant Sleath had won against the merely liberal Plorn with a majority of over 60 per cent. George Reid’s Free Trade Party had won half the seats and would have to go into a coalition with Labor’s twenty-three members, these including, as well as Sleath, the Balmain shopkeeper and future prime minister Billy Hughes.

  Sleath’s career in the Labor Party would prove turbulent. He would hold the seat until 1904 but would end by standing as an independent, since he was not amenable to party discipline.

  TRANSPORTED GENTLEMEN DECLINE

  From now on Australia increasingly failed the late great novelist’s dream that it would be the making of his sons. Plorn was left to seek appointments from old parliamentary friends. From the general nature of his written applications it is sometimes hard to gauge just what post he is seeking. On 20 September 1895 the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, J.P. Abbott, wrote that he was sure that a certain appointment would be made to Edward Dickens. It does not seem, however, that it was.

  Meanwhile, possibly in the hope of finding mineral deposits, Plorn was becoming interested in the geology of the west. A mineral destiny, like the pastoral one, flickered on Plorn’s horizon, as it did for so many colonials, and then died. By May 1897 Plorn, back in Sydney, wrote again to Abbott asking for his help in securing a post. Abbott replied that he was very sad to h
ear that Plorn had been unwell, but explained that he was bombarded with such requests and hoped that Edward’s wishes regarding employment in Western Australia would come to fruition. The job he sought was that of Secretary to the Department of Aborigines in Western Australia. He asked G.W. Rusden, ‘my oldest friend in Australia’, to recommend him to Sir John Forrest, Premier of Western Australia and legendary explorer, who was in Melbourne for the Federal Convention. Plorn told Rusden, mentioning the other race for the first time visible in the record of his life, that in his years on the Darling ‘I saw a great deal of the Darks, and in fact took a great interest in them.’

  Edmund Barton, handsome lawyer, furiously busy campaigning for Federation, and the venal and Rabelaisian George Reid, Premier of New South Wales, wrote Plorn testimonials. They were on their way to future prime ministerships of a federated nation. Sir John Forrest wrote a letter to Edward the day after he heard from him. ‘I will be glad to place your application with others for consideration—but seeing that there are many applicants in the Colony having also special knowledge of the Aborigines, I cannot hold out much hope of your application being favourably considered.’ Edward did not get the job.

  It would be June 1900 before he was given an appointment as an inspector in the Moree Land District, around the Gwydir River. The job involved visiting properties purchased under the new Land Act of 1895 to see that the contracts of occupation were being kept. If Connie joined him in Moree, where he lodged at the Criterion Hotel, she did not stay long but went to reside with her mother in Adelaide. Obliged to travel long distances on horseback over rough country roads, in the early days of Federation Plorn’s health declined. His drinking became heavy. The landlady of the Criterion Hotel, Mrs E.C. Everingham, was a kindly woman who let Edward owe her rent. Plorn also won the affection of a young man staying at the hotel, Roland James Rudd. When Rudd’s mother sent him some quail, Rudd thanked her and declared, ‘I would like some more for my friend Mr Dickens who has been on the sick list this last month and we can’t get him to eat anything hardly.’

  Henry and Kitty in England heard of their brother’s illness and sent him £100, which did not arrive until after his death on 23 January 1902. He died, said the doctors, of ‘acute phthisis exhaustion’ during a very severe summer where the night-time temperature did not fall below 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius) and the daytime temperatures were 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) or more. One of Edward’s other friends in Moree was a Methodist clergyman, the Reverend F.W. Hynes, who conducted the burial service in the Methodist portion of the Moree cemetery. So ended Plorn’s attempt to come to terms with Australia.

  For many years the situation of the grave was not known. Money was collected by the Dickens Fellowship in Sydney and a memorial tablet was placed in the Church of England in Moree. Over sixty years after Plorn’s death, his grave was correctly located and a memorial stone erected above him. Many other gentlemen exiles achieved even less than that.

  Alfred Dickens had continued to manage E.B.L. Dickens and Company in Melbourne in the 1880s, but like other Victorians seems to have invested in the land bubble. In 1888 he married again, a young woman named Emily Riley. A year after Alfred and Emily moved to Hawthorn, the depression struck and Alfred was so short of money that he remembered a reading of his father’s works that he had performed in Hamilton in the Western District ten years before. He decided to take to the road lecturing on his father’s life, and performing readings of his work. His first Melbourne lecture, addressed to the Bankers’ Institute, was a triumph. He next played at the beautiful Athenaeum Hall in Melbourne, then went on to Geelong, Ballarat and Sydney. There he wrote to Sir Henry Parkes, inviting him to extend his patronage to the opening lecture in Sydney. Sir Henry Parkes agreed to preside at the 18 March 1892 performance, but did not in the end honour the event, since the weather was so bad on the night. A second lecture was delivered under the patronage of the Governor of New South Wales, the Earl of Jersey.

  The firm of J & N Tait, theatrical producers of Melbourne, would much later organise tours of the United Kingdom and America. Alfred was glad to go, in part because of his unhappy relationship with his new wife. According to his American producer, he never mentioned her, though he often spoke of his first wife and his children. In 1910 he toured the English counties for three months, including in his program two lectures in London. He then rested before sailing for America. He was now over sixty-five years old and the tour of sixty-six lectures must have exhausted him, even though he received warm receptions everywhere. Agents received invitations for him to return to nearly every town in which he had given his lectures and readings.

  He returned to Melbourne somewhat more affluent than he had left it. Soon after arriving in England again he told a journalist that Australia was a magnificent country with ‘a fine future for an immigrant with little means’. He said that the advance of socialism in Australia would never destroy the imperial and British spirit there.

  Alfred left England for America in the autumn of 1911 in a weakened state. He lectured in New York, St Louis and elsewhere, including Cairo, Illinois, which had been visited by his father and lampooned in Dickens’ American Notes. Lectures elsewhere continued to exhaust him, though he sometimes received over $1000 for a single lecture. In New York on 30 December 1911, staying at the famous Astor, he felt particularly ill and collapsed in the hotel lobby. He cancelled that night’s lecture, and died that afternoon in his hotel room. Again neither the Australian earth nor the society of Melbourne, which through its economic depression had helped drive him on this deadly circuit, had served him well. He had told Mrs Johnson, the New York governor’s wife, how he had loved his beds of red geraniums in Melbourne and how his daughter Kathleen wore them in her hair. On 6 January 1912 his body was buried at renowned Trinity Church in lower New York, finding there the valuable earth he had never found in Australia.

  WHAT THE BULLETIN DID

  Established in 1880, the Bulletin found itself of a mind to exploit the disunion, uncertainty and class mistrust of the 1890s. John Archibald (a Victorian by birth who sometimes went by the name Jules François Archibald) saw his magazine, which he founded with an older journalist, John Haynes, as a means of focusing a new nationalism—radical, populist, republican, contemptuous of supposed nobility and pretension, anti-Semitic yet at the same time opposed to the sectarianism between Catholic and Protestant. Archibald had had an important experience on the Palmer goldfields in Queensland, and believed he had found in the miners there, in their ruggedness, humour and their abomination of Asiatics, the essential and admirable Australian. Thus, though he and Haynes had spent most of their lives in the city, the Bulletin was called ‘the Bushman’s Bible’, appealing to the mining prospector, the drover, the shearer, the self-educated, robust, new species. The Australian.

  Ballads had been sung in the Australian past to combat the immensity and silences of the Australian interior. So ballads played a large part in the life of the Bulletin. In some ways the Bulletin celebrated a world already passing, at least closer in to the cities and wherever the railway reached. ‘Those golden days are vanished’, Henry Lawson grieved in the Bulletin’s pages,

  And altered is the scene;

  The diggings are deserted,

  The camping grounds are green;

  The flaunting flag of progress

  Is in the west unfurled,

  The mighty bush with iron rails is tethered to the world.

  Shearers were riding bicycles instead of horses, or were humping their swags, to reach their shearing sheds. But beyond the railways and the good roads lay the Australia the Bulletin sought to honour and set up as a template of the national soul. So did its readers and contributors, from John Farrell, another journalist friend of Archibald’s who wrote the mocking, nationalist ‘Australia to England’, to the gentleman stockman Barcroft Boake, very much an Adam Lindsay Gordon sort of man
, and Lawson and Paterson.

  Paterson and Lawson are themselves interesting contrasts. Paterson was the grazier’s son. A Sydney solicitor, he wrote ballads of the bush. It never happened the other way, that people who lived in the bush wrote ballads of city life. The politics some people read into ‘Waltzing Matilda’—itinerant swagman against landed capitalist—was entirely unintended by Paterson. ‘The Man From Snowy River’ has no politics. Paterson personally expected justice from the station owner, who should be a man who worked with his shearers, paid high wages and was sympathetic to unionised labour.

  Henry Lawson wrote of the city, but as a bitter place, and the bush as a test for the soul and an arena of struggle and quest for justice. His father, Niels Hertzberg Larsen, native of the Norwegian island of Tremoy, had jumped ship in Melbourne to go gold seeking. His son Henry Lawson, born in 1867 in a tent on the goldfields at Grenfell, and taken at four by his questing Norwegian father and tough young Australian-born mother to the Gulgong rush, mourned for and mythologised the old goldfields, squalor and all, even though—or perhaps because—he could barely remember them.

  Oh who would paint a goldfield,

  And limn the picture right,

  As we have often seen it

  In early morning’s light;

  The yellow mounds of mullock

  With spots of red and white,

  The scattered quartz that glistened,

  Like diamonds in the light;

  The azure line of ridges,

  The bush of darkest green,

  The little homes of calico

  That dotted all the scene.

  By the time Lawson was six, his father had given up looking for gold and had selected 40 acres near Gulgong. Lawson never found the selector’s life romantic. He was a proletarian, one in heart with the itinerant shearer or agricultural worker, the drover and the doomed, scrabbling selector of the kind his father had been. But he also pitied the city working class, what he called ‘the armies of the rear’, because when not haplessly itinerant in the bush, he became one of them. He lived a harsh life from 1867 to 1922, and though many thought him a balladist beyond compare, he wrote for sixpence a line, so that his quality came and went with his thirst. His verses at their best were also a cry to anger and action in the white dispossessed of the cities who were required in their poverty to listen to city fathers blather on about the classlessness, the equality and prosperity of Australia. ‘They lie, the men who tell us, for reasons of their own, That want is here a stranger, and that misery’s unknown.’