Gold graves and glory

by Jackie French

  Exploring parties went ahead, looking for the best route and also for waterholes. The working party followed, digging the holes for the posts by hand, putting up the poles and stringing the wire six days a week.

  Things were worse for the northern party, however, when the wet season struck in November. Ten inches of rain might fall in a day. Holes filled with water, carts were bogged, and the animals got stuck in the mud. Even the food went bad in the heat and humidity.

  Finally, the men went on strike on 7 March and the private contractor gave up. Now the government teams had to do it all. It took six months for engineer Robert Patterson to bring fresh teams and equipment to Darwin—and now they had six months of the dry season to work in.

  At this stage, there was no way they could make it by the deadline. But Patterson decided to use horses and riders to fill in the bits that weren’t completed. On 22 May, Charles Todd sent the first telegram from Darwin to a temporary station at Elsey near the Roper River. It was raced by pony express to Tennant Creek where it was sent along the completed southern section to Adelaide.

  You can see a monument where the north and south lines were joined at Frew’s Ponds by the contractor Robert Patterson.

  It took nine days—but it did get there.

  MORSE CODE

  The telegraph that linked the colonies operated on morse code. Samuel Morse invented the code, which is made up of dots and dashes transmitted as short or long pulses of electricity along a conducting wire. When the operator pressed down on the switch, it allowed current to flow along the line. If the switch was held down for a longer time there was a long pulse; a short time meant a short pulse.

  Each letter of the alphabet and number has its own pattern of dots and dashes. ‘SOS’, the call for help, for example, is three short pulses (dots) for S, three long pulses (dashes) for O, then another three short pulses.

  The pulses of electricity sent out along the line by the Morse equipment got weaker and weaker, so that they could no longer be read. So repeater stations had to be set up, where the signals could be read, and then sent on again. Each had a Stationmaster and up to four operators and a linesman.

  Six men died in the building of the telegraph.

  The Overland Telegraph Line linked up with a submarine telegraph cable laid between Darwin and Java on 21 October 1872. This was connected to the British telegraph network and linked Australia with the rest of the world. A fault developed in the line between Darwin and Banjuwangi on the east coast of Java. But it was finally fixed on 27 October.

  Australia now heard the news of the world, especially as Australian papers had an agreement with an overseas news agency, Reuters. They would cable really important stuff to Australia, which would be sent south down the telegraph line.

  The telegraph made it easier to open up northern Australia. Big cattle stations sprang up. Gold had been found too, at Yam Creek, Sandy Creek, Pine Creek and many other sites. Hundreds of gold mining companies rushed to the area, especially in the early 1870s.

  KEEP THE WORDS FLOWING!

  The telegraph had been difficult to build. It was hard to maintain, too. Linesmen patrolled the line regularly, at first on horseback, but later on bicycles. Poles and lines washed away during floods or storms. Termites ate the poles. Lightning broke insulators, the Indigenous people cut the wire to use for fish-hooks, explorers cut the wire to signal they needed help, bushfires burnt poles. And once the line was cut by a frog getting jammed between the wire and an iron pole. The repeater stations were occasionally attacked by Indigenous people too.

  In December 1877, western Australia was at last linked by telegraph, via Adelaide and the Overland Telegraph Line, with the other Australian colonies and the rest of the world.

  The electricity was supplied by banks of about 80 large batteries at each station.

  OUTSIDERS AT ULURU

  Now the telegraph line and the repeater stations provided a base for other explorers.

  In 1873, the South Australian government chose William Christie Gosse, a 31-year-old surveyor, to head into Central Australia and the western deserts.

  Gosse’s party included camels and three Afghan cameleers provided by Elder’s company, along with an Indigenous boy, some horses, bullocks and wagons.

  They mapped over 60 000 square miles of country in the dry and heat.

  In mid-July, Gosse, Kamarn and two camels left camp to search for water. After two days they climbed a ridge and saw a flat-topped hill Gosse called Mount Conner, rounded domes in the distance that he called Mount Olga, and another ‘hill’. But as they travelled toward the hill, they were astonished to find it was a gigantic rock rising out of the plain, with a spring of clear water running from one of its gullies.

  Kamarn, one of the Afghan boys, shot wild birds and animals for food as often as possible, so the three cameleers would have halal meat, drained of blood according to their religion.

  They gratefully filled their water bags and Gosse named the great rock after the Governor of South Australia, Sir Henry Ayers.

  Today it’s known by the Arrernte name of Uluru.

  A European and an Afghan had ‘discovered’ the rock that had been sacred to the local people for perhaps 40 000 years.

  Gosse kept getting blisters, but Kamarn walked with bare feet and had no trouble at all.

  By August the country was getting even drier. They headed back to the telegraph line, only surviving because friendly Indigenous people led them to water several times. In return Gosse gave them matches, damper and sometimes a coloured scarf.

  At one waterhole Gosse’s horse drank all the water and left none for the camels.

  Luckily the camels managed to keep going for seven days in the heat till they found another waterhole.

  HOOSHTA!

  The camel driver would load the camel by calling ‘Hooshta’. The camel would kneel down to be loaded. Then the driver would whistle and the camel would stand up. The Afghan drivers talked to their camels in Pushtu as they loaded them, and hugged and rewarded them. Each camel in a camel train had its nose-peg fastened to the tail of the camel in front.

  The Afghans were paid about £3 a month, a quarter of the wages paid to a European teamster, who got about £3 a week.

  THE GIBSON DESERT

  A young stockman, Alf Gibson, volunteered to go with the explorer Ernest Giles on his expedition west of the Petermann Ranges in 1874. They crossed Lake Christopher, but their water bags were nearly empty. Giles told Gibson to leave him in the desert and take the best horse back to the water kegs they’d left as an emergency store further back. The plan was that Gibson would then go back to Fort Mackellar for help, while Giles walked back to safety.

  Giles walked and walked and finally reached Fort Mackellar. But there was never any sign of young Alf Gibson. He had simply vanished in the desert that now bears his name—the Gibson Desert.

  WARBURTON TURNS KIDNAPPER

  A new expedition led by Peter Warburton was paid for by the bloke who provided all the camels for the overland telegraph—merchant Thomas Elder. Elder insisted that Warburton use camels, too.

  The expedition left Alice Springs on 15 April 1873. They crossed soft sand hills and salt pans, travelling at night as it was too hot during the day.

  They were desperate for water, so they kidnapped two Indigenous women. One of the women escaped. The other one sneakily led the explorers away from any water, as she could survive where they could not. Finally, the kidnappers had to let her go.

  They killed their 12 camels one by one. They had nothing else to eat. But at last they found water and one of the party, John Lewis, went to get help and came back to rescue the others, bringing horses and more food.

  Slowly the map of central Australia was being filled in.

  CHAPTER 14

  AUSTRALIA, 1880

  By 1880 each colony in Australia had a capital city, and flourishing regional towns that serviced and relied on mining or farming. The main towns had at least some paved road
s, and often grand public buildings—theatres, shops of all sorts and sizes, fashionable cafes, suburbs of grand houses or workers’ cottages and others with slums.

  Australia was still a land of inequality, where many families pretended that Dad or Grandpa had never been a convict.

  Many ex-convicts became prosperous farmers or tradespeople. But many others were alcoholics or mentally ill and spent their lives on the move, doing odd jobs. They were known as ‘crawlers’—crawling from one job to another.

  Ex-convicts were supposed to be lower than free-born people. Protestants thought they were better than Roman Catholics, white was better than black, European better than Afghan or Chinese. The English thought they were better than the Irish, Scots or Welsh or Germans or Belgians. And all the new settlers believed they were superior to the original custodians of the land.

  The Indigenous people were mostly in ragged camps on the outskirts of the towns or on the pastoral stations. In many areas they were issued with government stores to keep them from starvation—or given a blanket to celebrate the Queen’s birthday.

  In far northwest Queensland things were especially bad. No person with black skin was allowed in some towns or on many stations, and farmers sometimes formed cordons—long lines of men on foot or on horseback—to hunt out Indigenous people and either kill them or move them off their land.

  By 1870 few city dwellers ever saw an Indigenous person. And they were scarcely even mentioned in books or newspapers.

  TOO BAD YOU’RE A SHEILA!

  If you were a woman you definitely weren’t as good as a bloke, either—no matter what your nationality!

  Until 1870 all Australian women had to give their husbands everything they owned when they got married. (Victoria was the first state to allow married women to have possessions in their own name.)

  Women were paid much less than men, too, and would continue to be for another hundred years. The wage for a washerwoman, who spent six days a week scrubbing clothes, was ten shillings—if she was lucky. But most women only worked in their own homes, or were servants working in other people’s homes. A very few were governesses, teachers or nurses. Women could also work as a barmaid, needlewoman, laundress or a wet nurse—breast-feeding babies for women who couldn’t feed the infant themselves, or if the mother had died.

  Most women spent their lives having kids, then looking after them and the house. They weren’t allowed to vote or own property.

  In 1880 the average woman had seven kids.

  Women’s long skirts and trailing lacy sleeves often caught fire when they were cooking. Girls were told to roll on the floor if they caught fire, or to wrap themselves in a rug or blanket to put out the flames.

  Fire was a great danger, as fires were used to cook and heat the house—and most houses were built of timber. Kitchens were often separate buildings to try to ensure that when they caught fire, the rest of the house could be saved.

  NEW INVENTIONS

  New inventions were changing people’s lives, though.

  By the 1870s the lantern had mostly taken over from candles. The flame in a lantern was protected by glass and a puff of wind wouldn’t blow it out.

  The main streets of Sydney were first lit by gas in 1841. Melbourne’s gasworks opened in 1855 and by 1900 most big towns had gaslights along the streets at night and many homes were lit by gas lamps as well.

  Gaslights were also dangerous. In 1872 a ballerina caught her dress in the gas footlights at a Sydney theatre and died of the burns.

  Gaslight meant that theatres could be brightly lit at night, too.

  Many people said that the new gas street lamps would mean the end of crime—who would rob a house if the nights were bright?

  The first use of electric light (from batteries) recorded in Australia was at the Sydney Observatory on 11 June 1863, to celebrate the Prince of Wales’s birthday. It was used on special occasions after that, but the first public buildings weren’t regularly lit with electricity till 1882.

  Australia’s first telephones were connected in Melbourne in February 1878.

  NOT QUITE RICHES FOR ALL

  The cities had theatres, schools and shops. They also had factories, where even kids worked 14 hours a day, six days a week. They rarely saw the sunlight and lived in small, overcrowded rooms in slums much like the ones their parents had left behind in Europe.

  TIME TO GO TO SCHOOL!

  By 1860 all the colonies had schools in the bigger towns. However, all but the very poor parents had to pay fees and only about half the kids ever went to school. Even then, many were taken out of school when the crops had to be harvested or the sheds swept during shearing.

  Respectable people complained that the streets were filled with kids learning how to swear and steal.

  New South Wales was the first state to really get education organised, with a law in 1866 that created a Council of Education to set up public schools. And the law said that kids HAD to go to school—even if their parents couldn’t afford the fees.

  One by one, over the next 20 years the other colonies followed. By the end of the 1870s all Australian kids had to go to primary school.

  In the early 1870s the first Indigenous kids were enrolled in New South Wales public schools. By 1880 there were 200 at school.

  From now on kids spent most of their time learning (and playing)—not working in fields or factories.

  LET’S PLAY!

  In Australia’s larger towns you could go to the theatre to see local shows or performers from overseas, dances, elegant balls for the wealthy, flower and vegetable shows, ploughing competitions, concerts, horse racing, cricket and archery.

  Australians were already sports mad, taking advantage of the warm and mostly dry weather after Britain’s cold and damp. Cricket was the most popular sport, followed by horse racing, sailing, swimming, rowing and football.

  AUSSIE RULES RULES!

  Anew Australian type of football match was played in Melbourne on 7 August 1858, with two teams of 40 players from Scotch College and Melbourne Grammar School.

  By 30 September 1866, the rules had been set out for the new sport—Australian Rules Football. It was to be played by the Melbourne Football Club, which became the Victorian Football Association, then the Victorian Football League and finally the Australian Football League. The new game was influenced by rugby and Gaelic football, and also by a game called Marn Grook played by the Indigenous people of western Victoria.

  One of the new rules was that the sport could no longer be played on fields with trees and other obstacles—but it could be played on any cricket oval up to 607 feet long (much larger than most other codes).

  HOWZAT?!

  The first Australian cricket team toured England in 1868 and the players were all Indigenous, mostly from the western districts of Victoria. They had 14 wins, 14 losses, and 19 draws—not bad for a country team playing England’s best. But the weather was so bleak that many of the men became ill, one died and two were so homesick they left early.

  The first Melbourne Cup was won by the great horse Archer, on 7 November 1861. Archer won the second Cup the following year, too.

  All were given mocking English nicknames for the tour (Sundown, Bullocky, Dick-a-Dick, King Cole and so on). No-one thought the English would be able to remember or pronounce their real names.

  OUT BEYOND THE CITIES

  The days of the gold rushes had faded, though some prospectors still panned for gold. But most gold was now being mined by companies. Some of the old goldfields like Home Rule and Gulgong, near Mudgee in New South Wales, were ghost towns, with only mullock heaps and eroded streams to show where the tent cities had been. Other gold rush towns, such as Ballarat and Bendigo, had become fine cities.

  Smaller towns had grown up along the routes to the goldfields. People mostly rode or walked about 10 miles a day and some of these ‘ten mile towns’ survived as centres for the new farmland opened since the gold rushes—towns like Melton, Bacchus Marsh and Ballan mark
the trail to the western gold fields at Ballarat.

  TURNING AUSTRALIA INTO ENGLAND

  Many bush workers still had poor, lonely lives, far from their friends. Their only holiday was a short break every few months to go to the nearest shanty or rough bush pub to spend all their wages in a night or two—then come back for more months of loneliness.

  Much of the bush had changed, too, since the new settlers arrived. The almost endless fields of yam daisies, with their bright yellow flowers that had covered most of the grasslands of eastern Australia, had gone, munched and trampled by the flocks of sheep and cattle.

  Thousands of miles of dead ringbarked trees covered hillside after hillside. Ringbarking had started in the Hunter Valley. Once a ring of bark was taken off the tree it died, as the sap couldn’t get from the roots up the trunk.