2 The Actors Assemble

The VERY NATURE of large discoveries of minerals engenders disruption. The more precious and the more readily available the mineral, the greater the disruption. Victoria in the 1850s proved unparalleled in its deposits of gold, with field after field opening up in the two years after Ballarat. Some of their names remain inseparable from the saga of gold: Bendigo, Dunolly, Beechworth and Ararat. Others had their moment of fleeting glory, from which they receded to become either sleepy towns or mere memories of those vast movements. Among them were Moliagul, Smythesdale, Fiery Creek, Eldorado and Amherst. At all these places fortunes were made but, more commonly, gain came in moderation to many while to some not at all. Yet the lure of the metal and the evident success of a few were sufficient to upset the minds of thitherto stable men, to cause their feet to itch and their eyes to wander from their menial tasks, the collars of their uniforms to pall and their chests to heave in hope. When a former constable of the Victoria Police, James Yarrow, walked into the Melbourne barracks and proved to his erstwhile fellows that he had made ;£500 in six weeks as a digger, their agile minds calculated that they could not make such a sum in their chosen profession in as many as three years. A distraught Chief Commissioner of Police wrote to tell La Trobe that fifty of his fifty-five Melbourne constables were resigning from 1 January 1852 and that, with water risen fivefold in price, wood sevenfold, and bread doubled, he could readily understand the disquiet among his men, despite the fact that their salaries were about to be increased by 50 per cent.1

For a colony which had begun its fiscal, and hence responsible, life on 1 July 1851 with a meagre £106,357 14s lid in its coffers, the immediate need to increase civil services, roads, port facilities, hospitals and all the other accoutrements of a civilized society caused considerable anxiety.2 It was not simply a matter of money, but it also depended upon competent, cool-headed and farsighted men being available to guide the developments. Chief amongst them in the new colony, after La Trobe, was William Lonsdale who, since his arrival at Port Phillip in 1836 as its first Police Magistrate, had served the old pastoral society well. By 1851 he was already aged with toil and cares, though not in years. When La Trobe made him Colonial Secretary he quailed at the prospect of being the spokesman of government in the Legislative Council, because he did not think he ‘possessed sufficient command of language to enter into debate’.3 On that particular score he need not have worried, given that the monied and propertied interests holding sway in the Council were united in their determination to ensure that their affairs were not put in jeopardy by gold and its seekers, or by the niceties of debate.

The squatters among them were not especially mindful of the fact that they held almost all the fair lands of Australia Felix in their grasp. Nor did it bother them that, in the seventeen years since they had started to flock there, the government had received only £288,000 as deposits on the land purchased by them, and nothing at all from 1844 to 1849. Those members whose livelihoods depended upon trade, making up nearly half of the Council, thought it clearly in their best interests that the diggers be kept in reasonable control. It was even more important that they pay their own way so that, in the words of William Westgarth, the merchants could get on with their ‘grand bent’ of ‘making money’. It cannot be assumed, however, that the merchants were incapable of a radical stand especially if they felt that the reputation of the fledgling colony, and hence their own business interests, were in jeopardy. The arrival of convicts on the Black Friar and the Lady Kennaway in Hobart in August 1851 moved them to ask how could Great Britain, ‘a great and enlightened nation’, ‘stand justified before God and man for rearing a second Sodom in the Southern Hemisphere, if possible worse than the first?’4 It was a refrain that the ensuing years would hear more loudly as Bass Strait saw more and more former convicts crossing to the Victorian goldfields and eventually its venom was directed against the Chinese.

To the extent that there was unity of purpose in the non-mining sectors of the community, the refrain crystallized in a determination to ensure that the goldfields did not become a burden on the common purse. From the very start La Trobe appeared irritated at any indication that the Treasury would be called upon to maintain the fields or incur expenses because of gold. When the postmaster at Ballarat resigned in October 1851, a recommendation that someone be appointed at 5s a day was met by La Trobe with the petulant remark that ‘It is very unfair that this should be a charge upon the territorial revenue’ and he suggested that the Sergeant of Police add the mail to his duties. Charles Hotson Ebden was Auditor-General, on his own admission ‘disgustingly rich’, who considered himself consequently to be a man of both prudence and foresight. When he received the first requests for an augmentation of departmental funds, consequent upon the raise in salaries of civil servants, he wrote to La Trobe in some alarm as the Legislative Council had declined to allow payment from ordinary revenue. To the Lieutenant Governor the solution was simple. ‘The gold revenue must be charged with it’, he jotted in pencil on Ebden’s letter.5

On the fields themselves the diggers did not deny that they had to contribute by some form of taxation to the increased need for revenue in the colony. It appeared to them that the means of tax enforcement through a licence fee were unsatisfactory. It fell equally upon all, irrespective of their ability to pay. The method of its collection had already become irksome to the diggers and they had no say whatever in the management of their own affairs, either locally or through representation in the Legislative Council. Their irritation was worsened because they had ready grounds for doubt as to the proper use of their taxes. The roads seemed to worsen daily, no provision was made for services to the sick on the fields, education facilities were practically non-existent and the mails—to these men their only contact with loved ones—were in disarray. The only thing that could be said for the licence fee was that it was there, and, if La Trobe and his Council were to have their way, it would remain.

The worst irritant, however, remained the manner in which the licence was enforced. It was maddening for men, many of whom had undergone a superior education, to be hunted like animals by young nincompoops gaily caparisoned in gold lace or by hardened old lags, who had seen better days as convicts, now wearing the uniform of Her Majesty’s constabulary. The knowledge that a part of any fine went to the police, whether for infringements of the licence fee or for sly grogging, made the diggers’ resentment boil over. They were convinced, with some justification, that a large measure of crime was committed on the fields because criminals were of no interest to the police while the diggers, as more promising prey, became the objects of unremitting vigilance. They resented this attitude because it led ‘to the total neglect of the suppression and detection of crime’ and seemed to imply that not having a licence or engaging in sly grogging were more heinous forms of crime than robbery and violence. Furthermore, officialdom even appeared to do little to assist them in obtaining the bare necessities of life. It was frustrating to see vast acres held in thrall by the squatters, while the obtaining of a meagre few to use as vegetable gardens proved impossible. Meanwhile, those same squatters frequently sold their scabby sheep as meat, thereby disposing of unwanted stock, culling their flocks and enriching themselves while the diggers choked on chops fit only for dogs.6

Yet none of this prevented the increasingly vast influx of newcomers into Victoria. Tiny Melbourne became the mecca of thousands who flocked from all parts of the world, but mainly from the British Isles, to the goldfields of its hinterland. Corning from afar with no assistance from government, they had perforce to be men of at least slender means. From them other fortunes were won by shipping companies, manufacturers of all manner of goods from hats to shovels, entrepreneurs, entertainers, publishing houses and all those sinews of commerce who profit by the needs and activities of others. In Melbourne, despite that huge concourse of manpower, little was available, whether in terms of a workforce or by the presence of necessary means, to make provision for the new population. When the Victoria Police needed 100 iron bedsteads in April 1852 they could not be made in Melbourne, so they had to be purchased from the army in Van Diemen’s Land. This simply underlined the thought already in the mind of the Governor that the main asset of the colony was gold, and upon gold and its revenue all else relied.7

Generally, life on the fields was orderly and peaceful with Sunday observed, women respected, the law obeyed and industrious activity the keynote. But at times men rioted, while others died of violence and disease. Amidst much drinking, dancing, singing, fist fighting, gambling and the reading of worthy literature, the search for gold went ahead. As a gold-bearing district Ballarat’s origins went back to the distant Tertiary period when the auriferous drift formations were shaped. Aeons later the hills between which it formed a basin—Buninyong, Warrenheip and the Bald Hills—erupted in volcanic violence. They poured vast quantities of lava down on the golden watercourses, stopping up or diverting them and covering all with a layer of basalt. Those ancient rivers disappeared from sight, but up above new streams flowed. They had little or no correspondence with the old ones which were perhaps 50, perhaps 100 or 200, feet below the surface. The new streams, too, were gold bearing and easily followed, so that their riches were soon devoured. But it took time and luck for the hidden ones to be found, and it was even harder to follow their courses as the old river beds had been twisted and thwarted by the lava flow.8

In May 1852 the small population of about 500 remaining at Ballarat first heard the magic word ‘Eureka’, which W. B. Withers records was named ‘by a medicine man’. Initially surface, or low subsurface, mining took place there, as had been the case at Golden Point and still obtained at the famous Eaglehawk Gully at Bendigo.9 Golden Point, however, was only a memory, with one man working the old diggings. While there was some activity at Canadian Gully, and at Black Hill and Brown Hill, it appeared that Ballarat would never recover its original fame. Nonetheless, at this time the realization gradually dawned that far below the surface the old, broken river beds were still there buried, with their golden treasure, beneath earth, clay and rock. Ordinary, open and unstructured holes were not sufficient to penetrate to these levels, for the earth could so easily crumble, water would erode the sides and men could be, and were, buried beyond hope of rescue in that awful bog of slime, stone and gold. The only material available to counter this was timber, with which the sides of the shaft could be shored up against collapse, and very rapidly the hills were denuded of the saplings that were felled to protect the diggers in their descent to the deep leads.

Down into the earth they penetrated, at the cost of enormous labour. The very nature of the enterprise brought stability, for the diggers had to be prepared to remain at their task for weeks, and even months, until they bottomed on the old bed. No man could work such a claim alone so the diggers joined together in small teams of six or eight and frequently of the same nationality, dividing up the labour as well as the costs, often in shares or simply in debt to storekeepers who were willing to take the risk of a final pay off which would enrich all concerned. Yet it was uncertain work, for after so much hardship it was possible to miss the lead as it twisted and turned far below. If that happened the diggers struck a shicer, which meant heartbreak, frustration and possible economic ruin. Meanwhile, a few yards away another party might follow the lead with precision, bottom dead on and strike it rich, mainly by sheer luck. To avoid failure, and to preserve success, it became customary to stake out claims ahead of the worked shafts in the manner of the old convict shepherds going before their flocks. The diggers hoped that, by so doing, another chance of wealth would be afforded. Shepherding became a practice that often aroused envy and bitterness and, together with the disputed rights of parties to work a claim, needed the adjudication of the resident Gold Commissioners. In such cases the Commissioners had to lose the sympathy of one party and, even though there was often agreement that they performed their unenviable task with justice, those who felt they were aggrieved found it hard to forget or forgive the judge.

It was soon apparent at Ballarat that one of the first rewards of finding the old leads was, to a few, immense riches in the form of nuggets of an undreamt-of size and, to many others, moderate returns in the shape of smaller nuggets. This was especially the case when a party had the good fortune to hit the junction of two leads where the nuggets had tumbled together in profusion. In January 1853 a party working a claim at Canadian Gully had found a veritable golden rock weighing 93 lbs, and then shortly afterwards another of 84 lbs. A few days later, at a depth of sixty feet, another monster weighing 136 lbs was discovered which, in gratitude, they named ‘the Canadian’. Such finds were unprecedented and they excited interest that spread across the world. Understandably they were of greater moment locally and especially to a small-statured, redheaded Italian in his late thirties who was working on the hill opposite the finds. His dog was called Bonaparte, while his own name was Raffaello Carboni, born in Urbino, Italy, in 1817. To Raffaello, neither Urbino nor indeed anywhere in the world was ever like this, for ‘Canadian Gully was as rich in lumps as other gold fields are in dirt’.10

In his youth Carboni trained for the priesthood in Rome but, whether deemed unsuitable or by his own choice, he left the seminary and became a bank clerk in that city where he put his flair for languages to good use. Later, in Paris, he worked on and gained moderate efficiency in French, English, German and Spanish. His long-held facility in Latin gave him access to classical and biblical quotations with which he studded his prose. In the 1840s he contacted some of those who formed the Young Italy movement, learned to hate the Austrian occupation of his homeland with an implacable fury, and fought to free Italy from the foreigners in 1848 and 1849. During these campaigns he received several wounds from which he still suffered in subsequent years. After a short stay in Paris and Berlin he became an interpreter in London, which he left for Australia in mid-1852 on a quest for the maddening metal. By Christmas 1852 Carboni was on Canadian Gully where he earned in five minutes more than he received for two days’ work in London. To the flamboyant, fiery and imaginative Italian, it was more important that he could do it without crouching or crawling to Christian or Jew.11

Carboni was reared in a society in which the supreme authority was granted tacit respect until overthrown, so he was surprised to find that no such conventions obtained in Victoria. Indeed, upon arrival, his fancy was tickled by an advertisement which appeared in the Melbourne Argus proclaiming boldly ‘Wanted. A Governor. Apply to the people of Victoria’.12 It was indeed the case that La Trobe had increasingly fallen out of favour with all but the representatives of the old pastoral and business interests whose control of Victorian society stemmed back to its earliest years in the 1830s. With them he felt comfortable. They knew that prosperity depended upon hard work and frugality, honouring the Queen and her representatives and respecting authority and the law. They were determined to uphold the British, and, in many cases, the Scottish, way of life which they had brought across the seas. What then were they and their governor to make of this new state of affairs which bade fair to upset the even tenor of their lives? How could they tolerate a situation in which fortunes were made in a matter of hours, rather than years; in which the flag had to fly with myriad others on the disreputable business houses of the goldfields where Her Majesty was, to many, a foreign ruler? What were they to think when the law was flouted by those who evaded a seemingly reasonable tax, while its enforcers were in large measure despised by men whose names frequently indicated that they had come from exotic lands in which rebellious rabbles had overthrown constitutional and even sacred authority?

It was all an enigma to La Trobe and he dreaded the day when the forces available to him to control this mob would prove too fragile. In late December 1851 he had a meagre military force of forty-four men, which was augmented by a further thirty in January 1852. Despite valiant efforts it proved well-nigh impossible to strengthen the police force, and a body of army pensioners brought from Van Diemen’s Land were untrustworthy and given to heavy drinking.13 The Governor became especially alarmed when a ‘serious disturbance’ occurred at Peg Leg Gully, Bendigo, in August involving ‘a party of Irish’ numbering 150 whose leader, Fahey, was killed.14 As a consequence it was with great relief that he wrote to Earl Grey to inform him that on 19 October 1852 the Vulcan had arrived with the officers and five companies of the 40th Regiment and his cup overflowed when he visited Ballarat in November and found the swelling population ‘orderly and well disposed’.15 Nonetheless, having concluded that the pensioners were incapable of further employment in the police, and no prospects being offered of further recruitment, he decided that, since he could not maintain his colony as a police state, he would have to turn it into a military one. By 1 January 1853 he had detachments of the 40th on the fields with some of them formed into a mounted force to be employed in ‘connection’ with the police. It was left to Carboni to sum up what was happening in Victoria when, after his first taste of a licence hunt a month after the governor’s visit, he reflected bitterly, ‘I came, then, 16,000 miles in vain to get away from the law of the sword!’16

Throughout 1853 Ballarat began to prosper again with the gradual opening of the deep leads and the need for the diggers to settle on the ground as they worked their claims. Unlike the other fields, and especially the Ovens, Ballarat was not extensive which tended to give it a concentrated population. As well as resulting in tight national groups, such as the Irish on Eureka, Ballarat’s size also meant that men got to know each other in a manner less apparent elsewhere. They shared the same hardships, experienced as a group the same set of authorities and rejoiced in, or lamented, the same amenities. Thomas Bath of Geelong, who had come onto Golden Point in its first few days, was one of the early buyers of land for business premises in November 1852. To the delight of all parties, except abhorrers of strong drink, he opened Ballarat’s first hotel in Lydiard Street in May 1853. The government authorities were still housed under canvas or bark but the hotel was a solid, wooden affair of one storey, to which was added another in 1854. The diggers, thitherto exposed to the vagaries of the sly-grog system, welcomed Bath’s Hotel with relief. It also afforded them an occasional escape from their canvas and calico tents with their rude furnishings and basic cooking utensils whereby a frying pan passed for all purposes except a billy. To men who needed intellectual stimulation beyond that offered by talk of gold, the lack of reading material was grievous. The first paper, the Ballarat Times and Southern Cross, did not come out until 4 March 1854. But in 1853 a lending library was established at Golden Point and, in that and subsequent years, books poured onto the goldfields at Ballarat and elsewhere because the diggers were avid readers.17 Indeed it proved to be the case that by 1854 the literacy rate for males was much higher than that obtaining in the English and Welsh population, and the female rate was not substantially less than the male. A friend of Carboni, W. H. Archer, then Assistant Registrar, computed the statistics and it was probably he who wrote in the accompanying report that they were ‘of the highest interest and importance to the Colony, both in an educational and political point of view’. It was an observation of which La Trobe, his Legislative Council and the goldfields administration may well have taken note for it was not with a population of unruly simpletons that they had to deal in Victoria, and especially in the case of the Irish of whom the males were 80 per cent literate.18

The erection of the first public house coincided with the provision of other amenities which helped to solace and strengthen the diggers. Theatres under canvas opened on the Gravel Pits in late 1853 and on Eureka in early 1854, while the Adelphi Theatre, in weatherboard, quickly followed. A veritable flood of establishments followed, including the formation of a Racing Club in 1853, and cricket was also played in that summer. In another way the diggers were afforded some measure of civilization with the provision of a County Court and General Sessions, situated in 1853 at Buninyong, and followed shortly by the legal profession who opened up an abundance of offices in Ballarat, resulting in Withers’s whimsical reference to ‘a forensic deluge’. A lithographer commenced his trade in 1853 while a cordial factory, owned by E. Rowlands, operated by 1854 on the shoreline of Lake Wendouree. It employed eight hands in making lemonade, soda water and ginger beer.19 Yet it was in the form of spiritual solace that the diggers were most favourably nourished, with the ministers of the various Christian denominations arriving quickly on the fields. Mr Thomas Hastie continued at Buninyong, from where he came down to minister on Sundays. The Anglicans were not present in the early days, possibly because of a grave lack of clergy, but the Methodists were firmly established at the end of 1853 with a resident preacher. Father Matthew Downing, a Kerry man educated at Naples, was the first Catholic priest to take up residence on the Ballarat fields, first at Brown Hill in February 1853 and soon afterwards near the Eureka lead where he established himself in a canvas and wood chapel and a tent. His bishop visited in November and described the latter as ‘the most miserable apology for a dwelling I have ever seen. A few wine casks serve for chairs . . . the floor is nature’s own making’. Nonetheless, Downing was happy despite falling down a shaft, getting lost in the adjoining bush on several occasions and having his digger’s licence demanded of him by a mounted soldier. He left in mid-1854 after proving that he could quell any disturbance amongst his flock, and especially the Irish on Eureka. In the event it was a premature departure.20

Among the several thousands who came to Ballarat at that time was a young Irishman, Peter Lalor, born in Queen’s County in 1827, and a civil engineer by profession. His father, Patrick, represented his county in the House of Commons, and before the famine proposed the refusal of payment of land taxes to the British. James Fintan, Peter’s eldest brother, took matters further. To the leaders of the nationalist movement called ‘Young Ireland’, modelled on the ‘Young Italy’ of Carboni’s acquaintance, he proposed by rebellion ‘to repeal . . . the whole and entire conquest of seven hundred years’. As with other Irish dreams James Fintan’s revolution of halfstarved peasants in 1848 ‘failed so hopelessly that scarcely a memory of it remains’. Gaoled before further attempts, he was released and died in 1849 of tuberculosis of his lungs and frustration of his spirit at the continued bondage of his beloved Ireland which he wanted to be herself, ‘from the sod to the sky’. But he left a lasting legacy that was not lost on Peter. Short of revolution, freedom could perhaps be won by linking it to another problem—‘the land: one ready prepared’. Among those thousands who fled in the wake of the famine, Peter and another of his ten brothers, Richard, left Ireland for Australia in 1852, while another three brothers went to America. They were fortunate to have the means to escape and begin life anew, which in Peter’s case was a job on the railway from Melbourne to Geelong, then under construction. Richard entered a business partnership in Melbourne in which Peter had a share, realizing him £800 when he left for the Ovens in 1853. In 1854 he moved to Ballarat where he tried several parts of the fields, finally sinking a shaft on Red Hill and living in a small hut made of logs on Eureka. He was still there until 3 December 1854.21

John Basson Humffray arrived at Ballarat in 1853. Born in Wales in 1824 he was the son of a master weaver who provided him with a good, liberal education resulting in his being articled to a solicitor. He was involved in the Chartist movement in North Wales and brought both memories and convictions with him to the goldfields. Carboni described him as ‘perplexed at the prosperity of the vicious and the disappointment of the virtuous in this mysterious world of ours’ and hinted that he could never quite make up his mind about anything that really mattered, but conceded that he was ‘a model in the pronunciation of the English language’, possessing a fine tenor voice and the ability to work his charm on his audience.22 Of one thing in particular Humffray was, and remained, convinced: force in any form beyond the moral was to him anathema. He would have no hand in its exercise and he resented bitterly its use by others, and most particularly by those who wielded authority. The very sight of a military force armed with weapons, helping the police to administer the law on the peaceful population of the goldfields, was, to the ex-Chartist, outrageous. It reminded him of the long struggle of his own people against the presence of a standing army in the land. To come to Ballarat and find that such a state of affairs prevailed there, was enough in itself, quite apart from the manner in which the military fulfilled their duties, to ensure that John Basson Humffray would exercise all possible moral force to win the rights which he took as belonging to all Englishmen.

La Trobe had long been conscious that his regulations and the manner of their enforcement were proving obnoxious to the majority of the diggers. Yet his worry that Victoria might ‘for a time parallel California in crime and disorder’ because of the convict past of some diggers and the lack of allegiance to ‘British rule’ of the foreigners, caused him to suffer a form of mental paralysis when it came to devising ways of alleviating the situation. The dead hand of the pastoral past weighed heavily—so heavily that he could not even implement the address moved by James Johnston and acceded to by the Legislative Council, requesting that he provide rentable land near Ballarat and Mount Alexander for agricultural purposes and hence a supply of moderately priced, fresh and readily available vegetables. The British government, through its representatives in London, did nothing to make his burdens any easier, although they too thought of a duty on gold exports, which naturally would reduce the purchasing price from the diggers. Furthermore it was intended that the duty ought not replace, but be in addition to, the licence fee.23 The implications of duties to the mercantile interests were immediately apparent, resulting in a general outcry by their spokesmen, and the diggers themselves pointed out that any such step would be ‘Class Legislation in as much as there is no Export Duty on Wool or Tallow’. The protests resulted in an inevitable ‘Select Committee on the Management of the Gold Fields’ which sat eleven times, took evidence and reported in early 1853. It decided that, generally, things were satisfactory and that the provision of more assistant and junior commissioners to collect fees and ‘detect unlicensed Diggers’ would solve matters. This conclusion was arrived at despite much evidence illustrating the unrest and agitation caused by the licence, the demands for the franchise, the lack of public houses, the payment of half the fines to the police and the general resentment at the prevalent impression that the goldfields were places of unparalleled licentiousness and crime, whereas in fact they were more orderly and free from crime than the towns.24

One new, flamboyant and possibly threatening element in the Victorian human panorama that La Trobe could not afford to ignore was the coming of the Americans. Indeed, were he to believe even half of the information passed to him through London from the British Consul in Philadelphia, he would have had, by early 1853, cause for deep concern. The Consul, William Peters, was given to reading the American newspapers and in late August 1852 he came across an article which stated that ‘a Republican form of Government’ was contemplated in Australia. This dream had its basis among the members of ‘The Order of the Lone Star’ who had established themselves for the express purpose of extending to the citizens of Australia the benefits of ‘Liberty and Republicanism’. Peters had spent twelve years among Americans and considered himself especially competent to pass judgement on ‘that class of them now on their way to Australia’. In his opinion the presence of such persons would not bring good to the colonies and he wanted ‘our Authorities in that part of the world to be on their guard’.25

La Trobe wrote back to London on 1 June 1853 and gave it as his considered judgement that while ‘some danger might be apprehended’ from an increasing number of Americans, he did not think that much republicanism was yet apparent among the few at present on the fields. He seized the opportunity, however, to draw the attention of his London superior, the Duke of Newcastle, to a far more insidious source of disaffection, the Argus. Since 1846 this newspaper had become firmly ensconced in the Victorian nest and it was a constant irritant both to himself personally and to the government he headed. La Trobe had never found it easy to accept the Argus as a responsible paper, and now he was convinced that it was bent on making the public familiar with ‘the idea of a substitution of republican institutions for the present monarchical form of Government’. He accepted that such ideas were probably not deeply ingrained as yet, except among ‘Chartist Socialists’ and refugees of such ilk. Nevertheless, given that its ‘cheapness’ placed the paper within the range of even a ‘day labourer’, and that it was ‘diligently and widely distributed on the goldfields’, it was surely the case that disaffection and disloyalty would spread with the Argus as its mouthpiece. To him the present was much less fearful than the future ‘because I would neither deceive myself nor others as to the power which republican and democratic tendencies ... possess when fairly roused and found to be supported by the masses within, and by sympathy if not by actual aid from without’.26

Meanwhile, on the fields the diggers went about their normal day-to-day affairs with luck to some, despair for others, and hard work for all. Carboni was still on Canadian Gully ‘in its full glory’ in 1853. He lamented the monthly licence hunts, and was outraged when, in October, they took place three times, thereby offering much greater opportunities to the authorities to engage in their favourite pastime. Nonetheless, the diggers, especially the English diggers, were merely annoyed rather than exasperated even though they hated and resented ‘being bullied’ at bayonet point. In November Carboni went along to a meeting on Bakery Hill where 400 diggers expressed sympathy with the plight of the Bendigo diggers and a petition was raised for a reduction of the licence fee. There was a ‘great waste of yabber-yabber’ about lack of digger representation in the Legislative Council and much complaint about squatter monopoly on the land, but it all went beyond Raffaello because, as he said, ‘the shoe had not pinched my toe yet’. Before leaving the meeting he held a brief conversation with a medical man called Carr. The worthy doctor confided to Carboni, in French, a piece of private news: ‘We are soon going to have an Australian Republic, Sir’. To that, the Italian replied, ‘What a farce!’27