Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  Sir William Lyne now considered that the best thing he could do was subsume the Labor Party into his own group. He offered them two ministerial positions, but they refused to accept them—no member of the party was to take office in any government other than one it had formed itself. The Early Closing Act was ‘welcomed with glee by those who stood behind the nation’s counters’. It clipped, said Hughes, twenty-five to thirty hours off the shop workers’ week and gave them their lives back. But there was great resistance from the small shop owners of the kind he himself had recently been. He claims he went around Redfern visiting small shopkeepers, soothing them, and being amused by an Irish woman sitting on a chair in front of her closed shop. He asked the woman how her customers liked the new arrangement. ‘O-thim! Sure they don’t bother a scrap; they just go round to the back.’

  When bubonic plague broke out in Hughes’ own electorate in 1900, spreading from a ship from Mauritius which had moored at Sir John See’s wharf—See being one of Lyne’s ministers—Hughes began to pressure Lyne about public health. Hughes had visited the slums around Darling Harbour and saw impacted filth everywhere and heaped pyramids of offal, garbage and putrefying dogs in backyards. The harbour walls around Darling Harbour were ‘daubed with excreta, and thousands of rats poking their heads out of holes in the wall’. It was something Sir William Lyne did not seem to be aware of and he was appalled. Hughes claims to have said to Sir William, ‘But do you know that some, if not all, of these filthy dens are owned by Aldermen of the City Council . . . the men who own these unspeakable hovels live in fine homes in the best parts of Sydney.’ The problem was that people who lived in squalor had no votes in local elections because they were not rate-payers. Thus, Sir William devoted himself to altering the local electoral laws. It seemed that Hughes was becoming an igniter—what people would later call ‘a fiery particle’.

  Hughes was also outraged by the conditions of labour on the waterfront. The Wharf Labourers’ Union had been smashed by the Maritime Strike of 1890, and members of the union were blacklisted. Work was very irregularly granted on the waterfront generally, and when they got it, men would often work a forty-eight-hour shift in a ship’s refrigeration hold stacking meat, and then get no more work for a few weeks. The revival of the union began in 1896 with the Fiery Particle pushing it. Friends outside the union willing to give it help included Archdeacon Langley of St Phillip’s church, who made his school hall available for union meetings, and Jack Kilbeg (Manchester Jack), owner of Mann’s Hotel on the corner of Kent and Grosvenor streets, a pub frequented by wharf labourers. The reinvigorated union was launched at Federation Hall in 1899. Due to his alliance with Hughes, the premier, W.J. Lyne was willing to attend. So was the Minister for Works, E.W. O’Sullivan, along with nine other members of parliament, as well as Archdeacon Langley and the Reverend Father Albury, whose parish was full of the impoverished dock workers of Darling Harbour. The waterside workers and their families predictably adored Hughes for organising this display of strength. But he was no firebrand. An industrial realist, before he left for Melbourne to serve in the federal Parliament in May 1901, Hughes urged the members ‘to avoid any rash and ill-considered measures’.

  Left: Mark Jeffery, a Tasmanian survivor from the days of transportation, veteran of Port Arthur’s ‘separate’ prison, was for a time a convict grave-digger on the Isle of the Dead, where he claimed to have come face-to-face with ‘His Satanic Majesty’. He would see Federation and die in 1903. (National Library of Australia) Right: Western Australia began to receive convicts in 1850 and the last transport ship arrived in 1868. Sad-faced William Stewart, former Western Australian transportee, pictured in 1900, bears the mark of many former convict males—loneliness, a sense of exile and a hard life as a labourer. (State Library of Western Australia, 066191PD)

  Left: Convicts did not expire and vanish with the end of transportation. Long-living and handsome, former Van Diemen’s Land convict and blanket-thief Mary Witherington in her later incarnation as Mrs Herbert. Her husband, a convict stonemason, carved her face in the multi-faced bridge at Ross. Though transported in 1835, she lived until 1890. (State Library of Tasmania, PH30-1-264) Right: Daniel Herbert, stonemason husband of Mary Witherington, in his post-convict, mid-Victorian Sunday best. (State Library of Tasmania, PH30-1-263)

  Young men of the British gentry sent to Australia to remake themselves were characteristically expected to return rich, informal in manners and clothing. Rendered uncouth by their colonial experience, they were capable of appalling even the liveried servants who opened their English family doors to them. (State Library of Victoria, MP00/00/56/38)

  Left: Edward Bulwer Lytton (Plorn) Dickens, less than gifted student, was a boy whose study of Latin was cancelled by his father Charles so that he could apply himself to ‘a general improvement of his acquaintance with the properties of the things he will have to subdue to his use in a rough wild life’ in Australia. (The Dickens Museum, London) Right: A successful Englishman G.W. Rusden, friend of Charles Dickens, clerk of the Victorian Parliament and pamphleteer and columnist under the Aboriginal named ‘Yittadairn’, whose persona he adopts in fancy dress for this photograph. (State Library of Victoria, H29562)

  Momba Station, north-east of Wilcannia, at which Plorn Dickens arrived before the age of seventeen, provided the beginning of a hard Australian education for him, and of expectations which turned out to be less than great for the young English son of the great writer. (National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an 24460098)

  Wool being washed on a creek of the Darling River in a year of good flow. But here as elsewhere in remoter Australia, water would prove to be an occasional blessing, and drought would determine individual and national fortunes and put limits on population. (National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an 24473329)

  Thomas Bungaleenee, son of a man detained for the supposed abduction of a woman who never existed, became inflamed with the tragic desire to be identified as white. He was the first of his race to be inducted as a member of the Independent Order of Oddfellows. (State Library of NSW, Mitchell Library, ML Q059/13)

  The first overseas war in which Australians fought was in New Zealand against the Maoris. These Australian volunteers were photographed one quiet day in 1864 outside their redoubt and signalling post at Kaitake near New Plymouth. Some of them stayed on to take up land grants as a reward for service. (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, ref: PA1-q-177-07)

  The arrival of neighbouring squatters, and the disposal of the bodies of the nineteen massacred members of Horatio Wills’s party at Cullin-La-Ringo, inland from Rockhampton. The Aboriginal people would pay many times over for their murders here. (State Library of Queensland, ACC 8085)

  Sir Samuel Wilson, previously ‘Bullocky Sam’, in knightly uniform. A land-hungry Ulsterman, he began small but acquired properties in the Wimmera and New South Wales, lived in the mansion of Ercildoune in Victoria and endowed the University of Melbourne. (State Library of Victoria, H38849/4983)

  Dad (Thomas) Davis, Steele Rudd’s father and model for Dad in On Our Selection, stands on the right in the second row with sons and grandsons outside the Davis homestead on the Darling Downs in 1896. The family wanted it known that this structure was not the original ‘old shingle hut’, but a house moved from elsewhere. (National Library of Australia, nla.pic-vn 4903038)

  Alfred Deakin, future statesman, as a child of Golden Melbourne in the 1860s. The visionary, questing quality he would bring to his adult face has not yet appeared in this sunny, suburban childhood which seems a planet removed from that of contemporary small landholders’ children such as Ned Kelly. (National Library of Australia, nla.ms-ms 1540-19-613-s7-a1

  Tom Wills, Rugby Old Boy and permanent schoolchild. An inter-colonial cricketer, he was the survivor of a massacre of his family by Queensland Aborigines, gathered a team of Western District Aborig
ines to tour England, and would be credited with founding Australian Rules football. (State Library of NSW, Mitchell Library, ML A927.96)

  A team of Western District Aborigines, the first sporting tourists Australia would send abroad. Here, in the summer of 1866–67, they pose by the Melbourne Cricket Ground Pavilion with their selector and fellow player Tom Wills in the middle back row. (State Library of NSW, Mitchell Library, a128392 /MPG/113)

  It is 1872, the Overland Telegraph is in operation and Brown, Australian settler, businessman and bridegroom, leaves his bed for the fourth time on his wedding night to receive congratulatory telegrams from London friends. Previously he would have had to wait weeks if not months for these salutations. (State Library of NSW, Mitchell Library, Sydney Punch, 7 November 1872 p. 466)

  In this illustration of 1869 entitled ‘Slave Trade in the South Seas’, Captain Palmer RN of HMS Rosario, appointed by the Admiralty to interdict the blackbirding trade, seizes the schooner Daphne and liberates the South Seas natives from the ships’ hold. Palmer despaired, however, of the colonial court system, which regularly found even murdering blackbirders not guilty. (National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an 10267974)

  Left: While dying in 1892 William Brookes, a friend of the Anti-Slavery Society, was carried into the Legislative Council of Queensland on a stretcher to argue for an hour against a law re-introducing Kanaka recruiting. The bill passed but the practice came under increasing pressure from the advocates of White Australia. (State Library of Queensland, 94376) Right: Kanakas, supposedly voluntary labourers for the sugar plantations of Queensland, are photographed on a recruiting vessel in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) in the 1890s. Regulations to return them home after a specified time were often ignored, there were notorious cases of on-board brutality and murder, and patchy diet and medical care meant that Australia was often their burial place. (National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an 24494646)

  Louis Becke in 1900. A supercargo on a blackbirder and crew mate of the notorious ‘recruiter’ ‘Bully Hayes’, he became a literary star of the Bulletin, in which his stories of serving on blackbirding expeditions were first published. (National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an 23193911)

  Left: Mrs Charles Rasp, wife of the boundary rider who came to Australia for the health of his lungs and who, while out mustering in the Barrier Ranges during the shearing season of 1883, took ore samples from ‘a broken hill’. Rasp became a mineral grandee and did not die until 1907. Mrs Rasp then remarried and became Countess von Zedtwitz. (State Library of South Australia B28306) Right: A young, intellectually inquisitive South Australian desert Aboriginal named David Unaipon, son of the first Ngarrindjeri lay preacher, was the protégé of the missionary the Reverend George Taplin. As an adolescent Unaipon would study science and anthropology in the museums and libraries of Adelaide. (National Archives of Australia, A659, 1945/1/1470, folio no. 85)

  Just before Christmas 1867, Prince Alfred, the first of the Queen’s blood to visit Australia, shoots rabbits on the estate of Thomas Austin, Barwon Park, a house and grounds fit for any prince. Brought in from Western England for such sport as this, the rabbits would colonise Australia and become an ally of drought in destroying pastures and pastoralists. (State Library of Victoria Ian20/12/67/4)

  Louis Buvelot, a Swiss immigrant and mentor to Tom Roberts and Julian Ashton, was considered by them a forerunner in the struggle to bring a true eye to the Australian landscape, which in this photograph he seems to approach confidently. (National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an 24230088)

  Louis Buvelot’s A Summer Afternoon near Templestowe was thought to be ‘thoroughly Australian’ by Fredrick McCubbin and other members of the Heidelberg School, although it appears to be an idyllic English scene to the modern eye. (Louis Buvelot, Swiss 1814–1888, worked in Brazil1835-52, Australia1865-88, oil on canvas 76.6 x 118.9 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, purchased, 1869)

  This often reproduced photograph of Ned Kelly’s lieutenant Dan Byrne, strung up dead in the doorway of the Benalla police barracks, has added significance because the man in the bowler hat on the left walking away with his sketch book is the asthmatic immigrant artist, Julian Ashton. At this time he worked as a magazine illustrator, but would live on to found an art school and provide a link from the age of bushranging and the age of the Australian impressionists. (State Library of Victoria, H13587)

  This magazine depiction of the finding of Byrne’s dead body in the Glenrowan Inn has none of the frenzy and fire of the events. The body was first discovered by Father Gibney, but the figure leaning over Joe seems to be a police blacktracker. This rather stiff wood engraving is based on the work of Julian Ashton. (State Library of Victoria, IAN03/07/80/105)

  In 1883, Germany had ambitions to acquire the north-eastern coast of New Guinea. In answer to these fears the Queensland government of Thomas McIlwraith used its small military resources to seize pre-emptively the south-eastern coast in the Empire’s name. The Empire was appalled at this colonial arrogance. (State Library of NSW, MitchellLibrary, SPF /2752, e)

  Left: The talented Russian scientist and explorer, Count Nicholai Nicholaievich Miklouhoi-Maklai, was in his early thirties when this photograph was taken in about 1880. Petitioning the Pacific High Commissioner to protect the land rights of New Guinean natives, he would later make the same appeal to Count Bismarck of Germany. (State Library of Queensland, 195877) Right: Immigrant girls were housed in barracks on arrival in Australia, in this case in the old convict barracks at Hyde Park Sydney. The more commodious and faster steamships, travelling through the Suez Canal from 1869 and reaching Australia in as little as thirty-three days, allowed immigrants to bring more fashionable clothing with them and to arrive in robust health. (State Library of NSW, Australian Town and Country Journal, 19 July 1879, p 120 TN 115)

  Infant mortality: a South Australian mother mourns her child circa 1875. Bush children did not die of epidemics as the city children, and this tragic burial was better provided for than those of the children of city slums buried for a few pennies in coffins made of fruit boxes. (State Library of South Australia B39315)

  Chinese fossicker ‘Ah Sin’, Aboriginal ‘Jack’ the blacktracker, and ‘Harry’ the white digger play cut-throat euchre for pennyweights of gold on a remote goldfield somewhere in Northern Australia. This degree of fraternisation was considered inappropriate and depraved in politer regions. (National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an 8927787)

  Louisa Lawson, future Sydney feminist, republican and mother of Henry, stands before her home in Gulgong with her son Charles William. The vertical logs of the structure give little promise of protection from wind or rain, a reality of which many selectors complained in their own cases. (State Library of NSW, Mitchell Library, ON 4 Box 4 No 18410)

  A mixed race family run a rudimentary boarding house on the gold field of Home Rule near Gulgong in New South Wales. Next door is the butcher’s shop where no doubt, according to the practice of pre-refrigeration, butchers carved patterns in the meat carcases to appeal to purchasers. (State Library of NSW, Mitchell LIbrary, on4_38 950)

  This engraving of Beath, Scheiss and Company’s clothing factories in Melbourne gives some sense of the industriousness of workers and the physical conditions under which they worked but offers the viewer little information about the abysmal wages and long hours under which such workers lived. (State Library of Victoria, IAN13/05/82/69)

  Veterans of the strikes of the 1890s face the camera in the new and utopian version of Australia founded by William Lane in Paraguay. Soon after the visionary but tyrannical Lane established Nueva Australia in the jungle in 1893, the colony split in two. The writer Mary Gilmore joined Lane’s second fore-doomed settlement, where staples were rice and monkey-meat. (State Library of NSW, Mitchell Library, a1188003 PXD 905 / no. 13)

  At Largs B
ay, a beach near Adelaide, on a late summer day in 1897, two young men could be seen amongst the waves. They were both native born and willing to be as strenuous in the sea as elsewhere. One was the youngish, industrious lawyer, legislator and journalist Alfred Deakin, tall and with a trim beard. The other was a much shorter but indomitable fellow with water dripping off the end of his wax moustache. He was the attorney-general of Victoria, Isaac Isaacs, son of a draper from Yackandandah who had come from Russian-occupied east Poland. His mother, born in London, had been ambitious for her son, who had not disappointed her with his talents, any more than Deakin, the other surfer, had disappointed his. Isaacs had studied law at university part time, graduating with first-class honours thirteen years before this swim at Largs Bay. It was claimed he had a photographic memory and could read law reports at a speed close to their handing down, and by 1890 he was an accomplished advocate, representing banks, land and finance companies and, on one occasion, the stock exchange.