You could hear Ballarat before seeing it.
It took Charles Evans a full week to walk to the diggings. Leaving Melbourne on 9 November 1853, Charles, his brother George and travelling companion John Basson Humffray dragged a bullock dray up long steep hills and down treacherous ravines. The dray became mercilessly bogged on some stretches of the road; on others, it was all the Englishmen could do to keep the cart from overturning in potholes, sunk deep by the ambitions of thousands of hopeful immigrants. The undertaking was far from pleasant, wrote Charles in his diary. But there were compensations. Crossing a creek and preparing to camp for the night, Charles noted that:
the scene from the hills was lovely beyond expression—the sun had set and a mellow twilight and the silvery rays of a full moon shed a soft light over the beautiful landscape…I can not remember any scene in my own country…to excel it—I was going to say, perhaps even to equal it.
A series of narrow ravines marked the long-awaited end to the ninety-mile journey from Melbourne. We found to our alarm, wrote Charles, that we had one of the most dangerous and precipitous roads to descend which I ever saw attempted. The final stretch of road ascended to a high tableland, and it was up this last incline that Charles Evans finally trudged, beckoned by the siren call of a scene he could hear but in no way envision. Atop the last gully, he was surrounded by eucalyptus and casuarina trees laced with wild cherry and honeysuckle. Another chronicler arriving in 1853, Thomas McCombie, recorded his first impressions of the Golden City:
A confused sound like the noise of a mighty multitude broke upon our ears and a sudden turn of the road brought us in full view of Ballarat. I freely confess that no scene have I ever witnessed made so deep and lasting an impression on my mind.1
First, there was the barking of thousands of dogs chained outside tents and mine shafts, marking territory. Then there were the horse bells, the crack of whips, the shrill chorus of parrots and the mirth of the kookaburra. The laughing jackass, newcomers like young John Deegan called it—was the bird greeting or mocking them? There was nothing ambiguous about the uproarious blasphemy of bullock drivers, their oaths echoing across the basin. Over all, Deegan wrote years later, that vague, indescribably murmurous sound, which seems to pervade the air where a crowd is in active motion was his first impression, and it would never leave him. It was like a genuine fairy tale.
Charles Evans made his final approach in the morning, but the bewitching effect was particularly astonishing for those weary travellers who arrived at night. Henry Mundy, a twenty-year-old shepherd who had migrated from England with his parents in 1844, walked from Geelong to Ballarat to find his fortune. As Mundy later recalled, the noises and scenes were indescribable.2 Standing on the ridge, he could see only the twinkle of a thousand campfires, like a mirror image of the night sky. Yet the noise was still bellowing. During the evening meal, the talking and yelling was incessant. Later, there was the ubiquitous firing of guns and pistols, a release of the day’s pent-up emotion, and accompanying the firearms, the ever-present rolling choir of the dogs. After the ritual gunfire ceased, accordions, concertinas, fiddles, flutes, clarionettes, cornets, bugles, all were set going each with his own tune. The effect, said Mundy, was deafening.
Bug-eyed and prickle-eared, those who arrived during the prosperous months of late 1853 looked down upon a sprawling tent city. In the foreground lay the vast level diggings of East Ballarat. A creek wound through a valley of low, flat mounds and conical hills. Rising in the distance, Bakery Hill; and on the spur, the site of the original 1851 strikes, Golden Point. Perched on the plateau above the diggings was the Camp, home to the aristocracy of the canvas city of Ballarat. This is how Thomas McCombie described the officers of the Gold Fields Commission, police and assorted civil servants entrusted with administering the impetuous throng of gold seekers. Nestled beside the Camp on a neat grid of streets was an embryonic township of stores and homes, some confident enough to be constructed of timber.
Encircling the whole was a ring of green, the remnant fringe of a thick scrub that had once covered the entire basin. The diggers, observed English journalist William Howitt, seem to have two especial propensities, those of firing guns and felling trees…Every tree is felled, every feature of Nature is annihilated.3 The majority of timber was used for tent poles and mine shaft supports, but in late 1853, Ballarat was also a ravenous camping ground, gorging on wood for heat, light and fuel. The blue smoke of ten thousand campfires curled slowly upward, observed John Deegan, and blended with the haze of the summer evening.
There were so many people going about their business, remarked Thomas McCombie from his ledge on the ravine, that the ground actually appeared as if in motion. From this distance, the people of Ballarat resembled a pulsating swarm. Henry Mundy too was struck by the lively busy hive, the throb of a community in constant motion, its kinetic charge heightened by the mad flapping of hundreds of flags. Tents and stores in the flats, on the hills, in the gullies, everywhere one cast his eyes, noted Mundy, every store had two or three flags flying; flags of all nations but principally the Union Jack. In the face of all the overwhelming novelty, a Ballarat greenhorn like Charles Evans could at least gravitate towards the familiarity of his national ensign.
It was like some grand dream…an entrance into fairy-land, wrote McCombie. He stood for a moment and watched the frenzied bustle. Listened to the din of thousands of cradles rocking gold out of clay on either side of a creek, startled as diggers popped in and out of holes like frantic moles. It was a scene altogether so novel, unexpected and unlike the dull every-day world, McCombie recorded. The view from the hill was so extraordinary that, once venturing into the basin—a taut geological drum vibrating with human enterprise—one could only anticipate a new order of things.
Indeed, gold rush immigrants like Dr Gillespie, who had arrived on the Marco Polo in the summer of 1853, would have expected nothing less. A revolution commenced in Australia which has affected the whole civilised world, he wrote in his role as editor of the ship’s in-house journal, the MARCO POLO CHRONICLE.4 What awaited the newcomer was no less than a new chapter in the world’s history.
Ages of tyrannous bungling and bad legislation had brought the continent of Europe to the verge of a terrific outburst. Every thinking mind looked anxiously onward to the next throb of outraged humanity. The unsolved problem of human happiness or misery found kindred echoes in the hearts of all men…The Australian goldfields have postponed the day of reckoning…
It is a virgin country.
In August 1851 a blacksmith named Thomas Hiscock made a discovery in the rural backblocks of colonial Victoria that would change the lives of hundreds of thousands of the world’s citizens, not least the hinterland’s traditional owners, the Wathaurung people. Alert to the gold deposits recently unearthed in New South Wales, Hiscock went looking for payable gold in the hills of Buninyong, some 110 kilometres northwest of the port of Melbourne. And Eureka! There it was.5 The alluvial leads were deep and seemingly endless, following the trails of ancient underground river systems—mute, furtive, auspicious. Victoria, only recently separated from its parent colony New South Wales, was suddenly the only place to be. Within days, news of the strike in the central highlands had spread to Melbourne and Geelong; within weeks, eager prospectors were making their way overland from all corners of Australia, from the garrison towns of Sydney and Hobart to the modest goldfields of New South Wales to the pastoral outstations of South Australia. Nobody wanted to miss the windfall; for Victorians and their neighbouring colonists, 1852 was the year when there was ‘nothing but gold’.
Henry Mundy watched the sudden exodus to the new goldfields with a mixture of incredulity and excitement. News of gold at Ballarat, he later wrote in his reminiscences, set the Geelong people and those of the surrounding district crazy. Overnight, the workers of Australia had gone AWOL: farms, building sites, ships, police barracks, government offices, shearing sheds—all were deserted. Schools closed and postal services were disrupted as the public service staggered along on a skeleton staff. The reports in the papers drove everyone mad, explained Henry Mundy. Every shepherd, hutkeeper, stockrider, every man, woman and child. All the world and his wife were looking for and examining quartz. Journalist John Capper, embedded with the diggers, concurred that society had become to a certain degree unhinged…the ordinary course of business deranged.6 Henry Mundy’s own parents walked off their dairy and hiked to the diggings. It seemed a simple equation. Who’ll buy cows in these topsy-turvy times? wondered Henry. Beef and mutton sold for nothing; digging equipment and transport cost a fortune.
The first on the ground were those closest to home. The township of Geelong became virtually divested of men overnight. Women banded together to draw water, chop wood, mind children and safeguard each other from the perceived dangers of being ‘without natural protectors’. The famous ‘grass widows’ of the gold rush were left in the forsaken towns like the soapy ring around a bathtub. Sarah Watchwarn was one of a band of Melbourne mothers who gathered at night in a central home, a faithful Collie dog being the only guard against blacks and outlaws. Sarah had arrived with her husband Robert in 1849 and settled in the outlying seaside suburb of St Kilda. Sarah later recollected that on the news of gold, St Kilda found itself devoid of menfolk.7
But not all men wanted to leave their wives behind, and not all women would consent to be left. Anne Duke’s parents, James and Bridget Gaynor, had emigrated from Ireland to Australia in 1842, when Anne was four years old. The Gaynors moved from Melbourne, where they had witnessed the laying of the St Patrick’s Cathedral foundation stone, to the mineral springs outstation of Mt Franklin, where they worked for the Aborigines Protection Society. They were well placed to be one of the first families to arrive on the goldfields. Anne was just sixteen years old when she married George Duke; the newlyweds went straight to Ballarat. So too did Jane Curnow when her life derailed. Cornish-born Jane immigrated to Adelaide with her husband William and their five children in 1848. Months after the Curnows’ arrival, William died of sunstroke. In 1851, on news of the gold finds, fifty-two-year-old Jane trekked overland from Adelaide to Ballarat, where her oldest sons soon began providing handsomely for their widowed mother.
But the path to salvation in this virgin country was not as straightforward as it appeared. For one thing, the road was clearly signposted with the evidence of prior occupation. Every kur (tree), yalluch (river) banyall (valley), woorabee (fish) and murrulbuk (eagle)—every rock, plant and creature—was part of an integrated spiritual, political and economic system for the Wathaurung people, who had made the fertile hunting grounds of the Ballarat basin their ancestral home for tens of thousands of years. For them, the gold rush of the 1850s represented a second wave of dispossession; the first was the surge of pastoral expansion—often violent—into Victoria from the 1830s.
It is estimated that prior to European contact there were up to 3240 members of the twenty-five Wathaurung language groups. By 1861, 255 Aboriginal individuals remained in the Ballarat region. Among these survivors were ‘Caroline’, ‘Queen Rose’ and ‘Old Lady’. What these three Indigenous women thought of the molten flow of white ghosts daily disgorging into their lands is not recorded. By the time Old Lady was buried according to customary rites in Ballarat in 1860, and Caroline and Rose died at Coranderrk Mission in the 1870s, the Aboriginal history of central Victoria was already considered a queer relic of an inevitably bygone era.8
Newcomers to the goldfields from 1851 often commented on the presence of Aboriginal family groups, their dwellings and activities. When eight-year-old Scottish lad William McLeish arrived at Ballarat in 1854 he was delighted to come upon some Aboriginal women hunting possums. One was up a tree; another catching them as they dropped. She said something I did not understand, William later wrote in his memoirs, but gave me a kindly look that reassured me there was no danger. On looking up I saw another woman engaged in chopping a possum out of a branch.9 Many gold seekers were less sanguine about the Aboriginal presence than young William. Samuel Heape dismissed the Wathaurung as poor helpless things, while John James Bond was disgusted to hear the howling of the lubras as their affectionate husbands drag them by their hair, dance on them or knock them on the head with their tomahawks.10 Few settlers and sojourners were prepared to concede, as C. Rudston Read did in his published account of his sojourn on the goldfields in 1853, that white man has stepped in and taken possession of his land, nolens volens. Early visitor W. B. Griffith recorded a glossary of Wathaurung language. He transcribed the most common nouns: words for sun, moon, water, fire, no, yes, old man, young girl. And he collected a handful of verbs: to walk, to run, to come, to go away, to rest, to know. And pilmillally. To steal.
Settlers might have been loath to acknowledge the Wathaurung as property owners, but many were aware of the extensive quarrying, and subsequent commercial transactions, being carried out by Victorian Aboriginal people prior to and after British colonisation. Gold was among the minerals extracted by Aboriginal people, as Captain Cadell, explorer of the Murray River, noted when in 1857 he registered a claim for the reward offered by the South Australian Government to discover a goldfield in that colony (in part to lure back its prodigal population). Cadell made his claim conjointly with a black woman, or lubra, known as Betsy, who has resided at Cape Willoughby…for 30 years.
It appears that the latter recently informed the captain on being shown some nuggets from Ballarat, that she had seen plenty of ‘dat yellow fellow tone’; and that when her son was a ‘piccaninny’ she, in company with another lubra, had beat out these stones, in her own words ‘made ’em long’.11
Aboriginal people’s superior knowledge of gold deposits, like their prior ownership of the land, was no secret.
Wathaurung people were initially bemused that white people would go to such frenzied lengths to take so much of the yellow fellow tone or medicine earth from the ground. After all, you couldn’t eat it, cut with it or use it to hunt. But they were also wise to the opportunities for their own commercial and social advantage presented by the European lust for gold. To the Indigenous locals, gold only became a ‘precious metal’ when it was clear that the newcomers were so desperate to find it. Object exchange formed the basis of kinship relations, which were the backbone of Indigenous social, political and economic organisation. Wathaurung brought the white newcomers into their circle of influence, a fact demonstrated in the following exchange between two women whose paths had suddenly collided:
My mother and wife and small boy that come out from England with us was standing at the tent one day all alone, no other tents near when they saw a mob of native Blacks and Lubrias [lubras] and a mob of dogs with them come across the gully so my wife said to Mother what ever will we do now so Mother said we must stand our ground and face them for there is no get away So up they come yabbering good day Missie. You my countary [country] woman now…the Blacks said You gotum needle missie you gotum thread you Gotum tea you Gotum sugar you Gotum Bacca [tobacco]. So Mother had to say yes to get rid of them and had to give them all they asked for to get rid of them. That was what was called the Bunyong [Buninyong] tribe and when they left they gave their usual salute. Goodbye missie and thankfull enough they was to see them disappear off into the bush.12
The white woman may have considered this would be the end of the affair, but to the Buninyong woman, initiating a new ‘country woman’ joined their families in a relationship of reciprocity and mutual obligation.
During the period of pastoral expansion, many ngurungaeta (elders) formed kinship alliances with squatters in order to gain permanent access to their ancient ceremonial and hunting grounds. With the sudden surge in population into their territory, Wathaurung quickly translated the principal of bilateral transactions from complex socio-political associations to a more purely economic function. One way to do this was for local Indigenous guides to point diggers in the direction of a new ‘discovery’ in exchange for money or goods.13 Another was to supply the rapidly growing demand for dallong, heavy thick rugs or cloaks, made from wollert (possum), goin (kangaroo) or tooan (flying foxes). Dallong were prized by white fortune-seekers not only for warmth on frosty nights in a flimsy tent but also as a sartorial status symbol, due to the majestic appearance afforded to the wearer. A dallong could fetch as much as £5, and some indigenous makers sold enough to buy horses, as well as rice, sugar, bread, tobacco and alcohol. Other objects and consumables useful to the digging life, such as biniae (baskets) and karrup (spears) were also traded or sold. As historian Fred Cahir argues, Wathaurung were ‘not outside the landscape in the development of modern economic institutions’; rather they successfully adapted to and exploited the commercial opportunities presented by the open, unregulated market of the early gold rush.14 Ballarat’s early residents soon came to rely on Indigenous knowledge and craftsmanship.
By Christmas 1852, a year after Thomas Hiscock’s ‘discovery’, the luxuriant lands of the Wathaurung had been stripped of vegetation to become ravaged earth, honeycombed by holes and studded with calico tents. As Henry Mundy noted, the gullies were so crowded with people laying their small claims to river frontage that there was not a shadow of a chance to edge in.
But this was nothing compared to the avalanche of human endeavour that was about to descend.
It wasn’t until early in 1853 that, as one early settler put it, a huge tidal wave…the memorable rush from England and everywhere else began in earnest.15 If the first flood of inter-colonial gold seekers wasn’t enough to change Victoria’s fortunes—and alter things irrevocably for the land’s first inhabitants—this inpouring of the world’s schemers and dreamers was without doubt an immutable turning point.
News of Victoria’s seemingly infinite supply of alluvial gold permeated the newspapers and market squares of London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, Warsaw, Munich, Washington, Toronto and Shanghai. Entrepreneurial American George Francis Train was eager to volunteer as the Australian correspondent for the BOSTON POST. He wrote from New York on the eve of his journey in February 1853 that the Australian fever seems to be raging here as well as Boston. Twenty-four-year-old Train would later become a flamboyant presidential candidate, profligate financier and inveterate world traveller. But now, staring out over the wharf at Ellis Island, the dapper Bostonian was consumed by a singular mission: to capitalise on the mercantile potential of a wonderful country where in a single hour the poorest beggar is worth his thousands, by a happy freak of fortune. Train would not dig, but buy and sell.
By his side on the dock stood his new bride, Wilhelmina Wilkinson Davis. The couple were an odd match. Willie was ten years George’s senior, and the daughter of Colonel Davis of Louisville, Kentucky—a slave owner and unlikely confidant of Abraham Lincoln. George was a voluble supporter of progressive causes, from Fenianism to women’s suffrage; Willie was a southern belle. They were united by love and the grim memories they shared.
Willie and George were married in October 1851 and they had a new baby girl when they made the decision to reap the commercial rewards of what Willie termed England’s El Dorado. But shortly before their departure tragedy struck, and it was with a grief-stricken heart that Willie hauled herself on board the Batavia.
Many and sad the changes through which I have passed, she wrote to a friend:
our beautiful babe was too fragile to stem the current of life—and only a week before we were to sail for Australia we were called upon by God to ‘render up to him the being that was his’ and instead of a pleasant voyage with our little daughter to while away the weary hours we lied her in Mount—and turned our faces towards ‘the Southern Cross’ with hearts crushed almost to the earth.
For the Trains, a cruel twist of fate had turned a thrilling adventure into an odyssey of despair.16
If the Australian fever was raging across the globe, it seemed destined not to break. Reports of the continuing success of the early diggers confirmed that the gold in the hills of Victoria wasn’t a mere flash in the pan. It would be worth it—well worth it, said correspondents like Train—to uproot families, dismantle homes, flee employers, abandon villages and join the mass movement of people to Australia. Gold was ‘the lubricator of world trade during a period of great industrial and commercial expansion’, as historian Weston Bate puts it.17 As fiscal capital, gold was a pure currency, unsullied by the usual monetary trappings of borrowing, regulation and control. With gold, there was no middleman. The seemingly insatiable demand for the yellow mineral meant that prices remained high and stable. As social capital, gold symbolised the alchemic possibility of personal transformation. Anyone with the Midas touch was instantly master of his own domain.18
The viral spread of enthusiasm for gold’s life-changing potential is most readily apparent in the population statistics for this era. In 1851, Victoria had a population of 77,000 people. That number skyrocketed to 237,000 by 1854 and 411,000 by 1857. By 1861, the population of Victoria was 540,000—half the total population of Australia. About a quarter of this meteoric multitude lived in Melbourne and the rest were scattered across the goldfields. In his official account for 1853, Victorian Government immigration agent Edward Bell reported that 77,734 unassisted immigrants had arrived that year: 33,032 from the United Kingdom, 35,834 from other colonies and 8868 from other countries. In addition to this, 14,578 people had arrived through the government assistance schemes that had been introduced in the late 1830s to rid Great Britain of its surplus labour and supply the colonies with an economically advantageous mix of settlers.19
A comparison with the population flows to the United States shows just how the tide of human ambition had turned towards Australia’s shores. In 1845, 518,538 people emigrated from the United Kingdom to the United States. In the same year, only 830 found their way to Australia. By 1853, the number of people going to America had only increased by 21,183. Australia had received 87,424 new souls.
The glowing reports of the rivers of gold flowing through central Victoria couldn’t have come at a better time for the world’s fortune hunters: by 1853, the Californian gold rushes of ’49 had buckled under the law of diminishing returns. The imagination of the world, ignited by the romance and adventure of gold seeking, now had somewhere else to blaze. In New York, according to George Francis Train, Australia was the only topic on the street, on ’Change, at the club, or in the counting house. The Victorian gold rush was nothing short of a commercial revolution. As Train breathlessly reported after his arrival in Victoria, nowhere else in the world did such a go-aheadative place exist.
What is most striking about the profile of gold rush immigrants is their youth. It was the world’s young people who most readily grasped the opportunity to seek the wider horizons of Victoria’s golden frontier. Going ahead—getting ahead—became the motto of the mid-1850s, as if the old world was a glutinous bog, dragging down aspirations and suffocating dreams. Now there was an empty land far from home where one could break free of the quicksand of economic stagnation and the mire of tradition. George Francis Train, at twenty-four, was typical. Not an upstart or an ingénue, but genuinely representative: young, newly married, starting out, getting ahead. He was also a man who would not be fazed by cataclysmic change. At the age of four, George had been orphaned when his parents and three sisters died in a yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans.
Charles Evans too felt the primal tug of new beginnings and was young enough to make the transition. Charles James Evans was born in 1827 in Ironbridge, Shropshire, a town that calls itself ‘the Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution’ and takes its name from the famous thirty-metre, cast-iron structure that was built across the River Severn in 1779. Charles was the second in his family of four boys: brother George Bassnet was senior by two years. Charles and George’s father, Charles, worked as an excise officer, postmaster and printer. He was a learned man who raised his sons to value education and their Wesleyan faith.
But when Charles Sr died prematurely, the family’s fortunes plunged. His widow Jane took her youngest sons and set up shop as a milliner in nearby Wellington. At fourteen, Charles was working as a farm labourer and sixteen-year-old George was down a coal mine. The Evans boys spent their adolescence in and out of the homes of relatives and friends: drapers, printers, stationers. On learning of the discovery of gold in Victoria, Charles and George were ready and willing to exchange a life of hard labour in the English midlands for the opportunity, as George recorded in his diary, to make mother independent of others assistance. The brothers were twenty-five and twenty-seven when they arrived in Melbourne on the Mobile in October 1852. Statistically, they were right on the money.
The Victorian Census of 1861 shows that approximately forty per cent of the population of Ballarat was between twenty and thirty-four years old. Another forty per cent were children aged under twenty. Visitors to Victoria often commented that there were no old people to be seen. Merchant Robert Caldwell noted that the gold rush cohort was one of amazing energy, young, impulsive, generous and restless. Leaving New York with his brother Davis in April 1853, twenty-two-year-old Dan Calwell assured his sisters back home in Ohio that they could not imagine how our hearts bounded in anxious anticipation of soon overstepping the long limited boundaries. Even in the Land of the Free the impatient Calwells felt the weight of family expectation and middle-class convention. We are young, reasoned Dan, and must do something to give ourselves a start in the world. We have human hearts.20
The restive hearts of the impetuous new arrivals remained buoyant in the giant open-air camp grounds of the early diggings. In 1851 there were 3851 births recorded and 2724 marriages officiated in Victoria. By 1855 these figures had more than trebled to 12,626 and 7816 respectively. In Ballarat, there were five babies born in 1851. In 1857 there were 1665 recorded births. Approximately one-fifth of the babies born in Ballarat in 1854 were ex-nuptial.21 ‘Boundary riders of modernity’ is how historian David Goodman has characterised the Victorian gold diggers, a neat encapsulation of the mobility, vigour, liberalism and confidence of a generation of rule-breakers. For them, no barricade was too solid to penetrate.
Thomas and Frances Pierson, late of the Pennsylvania Olive Lodge, were, at thirty-nine and thirty-two years of age, swimming against the demographic tide. But surely they were not too old for an adventure. In fact, Thomas would write in his diary, something novel was just what they needed. In any case, the Piersons had always been a bit peculiar: only one child, fifteen-year-old Mason. And Frances with her photographic equipment and talk of setting up a daguerreotype studio in Victoria. On 30 September 1852, the 480-tonne clipper Ascutna left Staten Island to shouts of hurahs, cheers, waveing handkerchiefs, hats tc tc fireing of pistols and farewell music. With little else but news of Australia in the American papers for months now, Frances and Thomas were lucky to get a berth. One hundred and seventy other passengers and a mountain of merchandise joined the Piersons on the Ascutna.22
But as Thomas Pierson noted, even on the ships departing from New York, the passengers were not all of one hue. Nearly every nation of the world is represented on our ship, wrote Thomas.
One way or another, the racially and ethnically diverse bunch had all come for one thing. We are beginning to see the elephant, reported Pierson with pride, as land became a distant vision and the chill of a New York fall gave way to the untimely heat of the Caribbean. Frances and Thomas understood now why, in the Californian gold rush, it was said that prospectors went to ‘see the elephant’. In the early nineteenth century, the arrival of a travelling circus in a small American town was a singular occasion. Folks would come from all parts to sample the bizarre attractions: wild beasts from Africa, fabled creatures like the Wolf Boy and other sideshow freaks. The major drawcard at these carnivals was the elephant: an animal larger than any native to North America.
By the 1830s, to ‘see the elephant’ had come to mean ‘to experience all that there is to see, all that can be presumed, known and endured’. It spoke of deprivations, but also rewards. ‘Did you see the elephant?’ parents would ask their prodigal son. Did you go where you set out to go? Did you see what you set out to see? In time, the catchphrase acquired a military usage, suggesting a loss of innocence with first combat: a ritual transition from naivety to experience.
In the mid-nineteenth century—a time before passports, credit cards and rigorous records—innocence came in many guises. It could be refabricated too. Many of the women who came to Victoria had already lived a thousand colourful, capricious lives.
For Sarah Hanmer, the gold rush offered the chance to move back the hands of time. Born into a Protestant Scots–Irish farming family in County Down, Ireland, twenty-three-year-old Sarah Anne McCullough married Henry Augustus Leicester Hanmer at St James, Clerkenwell in 1844. Henry Hanmer was a widowed surgeon; Sarah was a single mother. Four years earlier, her affair with a London accountant, Frederick Ford, had produced a child but no ring. It’s unclear how her marriage to Henry concluded, but by 1850, Sarah was living in Albany, New York, and possibly working as an actress. She appears to have gone to America without her daughter Julia, who perhaps lived with Sarah’s brother William McCullough. Sarah may also have worked for a time at the Adelphi Theatre in San Francisco, which was located near to Rowe’s Circus. She later returned to London, booked a passage on the Lady Flora for herself, Julia and William, and sailed for Victoria, arriving in August 1853.
John James Bond, a fellow passenger on the Lady Flora, noted in his ship journal that the voyage had been discomfort from beginning to end. There was no fresh meat, the coffee was burnt, the sea biscuits musty and all passengers staggered out at Port Phillip three parts starved. We have been taken in, Bond lamented.
But thirty-two-year-old Sarah Hanmer had her own conjuring trick up her sleeve. As if by magic, she took six years off her age, reporting to the immigration agent that she was twenty-six. Julia was twelve. Nobody stopped to do the maths. Mrs Leicester Hanmer, acclaimed London actress, had arrived, and her adopted home of Ballarat would soon know all about it.
Clara Du Val was another woman who could make husbands and birthdays disappear. Irish-born Clara Lodge was a tearaway from an early age. Popular legend (a story that Clara herself might have propagated) has it that Clara’s ambitious father held a ball in her honour when his daughter turned seventeen, at which Clara appeared in a belt studded with seventeen sovereigns to wear around her seventeen-inch waist. After the ball, the story goes, Clara was presented to Queen Victoria but instead of moving smoothly into a good marriage, she eloped with French artist Claude Du Val. Together the love-struck couple sailed in 1847 for Victoria where, Claude having died, the grieving widow du Val provided for herself as an actress. It was a tale that no doubt played well when Clara began treading the boards in Ballarat’s theatres. Shipping records reveal, however, that Clara arrived in Victoria on the Marco Polo in May 1853. She gave her age as twenty; she was in fact thirty-four. There is no evidence of a Claude Du Val arriving or dying in Australia. In fact, Clara had eloped in 1830 with her dancing teacher, George William Du Val, the brother of renowned portrait painter Charles Allen Du Val. Clara and George ran into trouble with the law in the Isle of Man and later Liverpool, where George was arrested as part of a gang involved in a botched kidnap. Moreover, when Clara sailed to Victoria, she brought two of her three children with her: nine year-old Oliver and one-year-old Francis. Francis’s twin sister, Clara, was left in Ireland. Whether Clara Du Val had ever met Queen Victoria or not, she had certainly seen the elephant.
Margaret Brown Howden was one of perhaps few real innocents going abroad. As she stood on the wharf at Birkenhead in May 1854, twenty-three-year-old Maggie was thinking of one thing only: her fiancé, dear Jamie. The farewell dinners in her native Scotland, the last calls, the settling of accounts, the shopping and packing and getting of gifts, being driven to the station by tearful relations—these things were all behind her now. Maggie was sad, but stoic: we cannot know what changes may take place, she wrote in her diary, [but] never shall I forget my dear home. Margaret was reared among the god-fearing gentility of the Scottish borders, the third daughter of Francis and Sophia Howden. There is a touch of exotica about her belied by her sheltered upbringing: Margaret’s mother was born on the Prince of Wales Islands, later to become Penang, to a Chinese mother, Ennui, and a Scottish planter father, David Brown. But this was Maggie’s first time at sea. Oh dear! she wrote when the sails had been hoisted, the vessel was rolling and there was no turning back. I wish things would go on well to take me to my Jamie.
James Johnston, older brother of a dear friend, was waiting for Margaret Howden in Melbourne. James Johnston, Assistant Gold Commissioner at Ballarat: appointed in November 1853 with a salary of £400. James Johnston, nephew of George Johnston, famous in Australia for helping to arrest and depose Governor Bligh. Assistant Resident Commissioner James Johnston. Jamie. My Jamie.
By the time Charles Evans began his final descent into Ballarat on 16 November 1853, he had been in Victoria for just over a year. On his arrival at the ridge overlooking the diggings, after his week-long walk, he had but one shilling to his name. The great tent he and his brother George had purchased to start an auction house was safely loaded on the bullock dray, along with a few items to start knocking down. The night before, he and his companions had camped in a swamp, sharing a damper for their supper. Everything was damp, Charles wrote in his diary, considerably damp—the ground, our beds, our bodies and our spirits.
He and George had started many enterprises over the past twelve months: a confectioner’s store, a coffee-roasting business, pie making, boarding house keeping, carting. All had failed to produce more than a hard day’s work. He had been to the Ovens diggings and come back starving. He had seen men grow fat and others go mad. He should have known a thing or two about how this colony could turn pumpkins into carriages and just as readily change them back again. But still, when he at last walked onto the Ballarat digging, Charles was nothing short of flabbergasted.
We were astonished, wrote Charles, to see the immense number of stores—every fourth or fifth tent was either a store or a refreshment tent. He couldn’t fathom how they all made a living until the riddle was in a great measure solved…nearly all sold grog. This was only the first revelation. Contrary to our expectations, Charles lamented, there were several auctioneers carrying on business. How would they ever sell their wares, and thus get a meal that was more sufficient than damper and tea? The Evans brothers took a punt. Asking some miners as to the probable course of the diggings for the ensuing summer, they chose a locality with very few tents; a quiet spot near the bridge on Commissioner’s Flat. If the underground rivers of gold flowed their way, Charles reasoned, it will soon be the busiest quarter on the diggings.
Eugene von Guérard’s famous painting Old Ballarat as it was in the summer of 1853–54 hangs in pride of place at the Art Gallery of Ballarat. Austrian-born von Guérard painted his masterpiece in 1884 or ’85, some thirty years after the time he spent living on Golden Point in Ballarat. His memory was surely encrusted with a sugar coating of nostalgia or, along with his own yellowing notes and sketches, he had a copy of James Bonwick’s AUSTRALIAN GOLD DIGGER’S MONTHLY MAGAZINE AND COLONIAL FAMILY VISITOR at hand. Von Guérard, with his scene of verdant hills and corpulent sheep, draws on the same ideological palette as Bonwick, who, in January 1853 penned a profile of a typical diggings home in the Ballarat valley.
Amongst the deep shade of the towering Eucalypts… [reside] the rosy cheeks of the little one, the contented smile of the matrons of the camp…the fret and fever of life have little place in the quietude and salubrity of this Diggings station…[there are] fuel and water for fetching, with no fear of a rent collector…privacy and security.
Bonwick could see nothing but associations of the picturesque and beautiful. Von Guérard’s view of Golden Point depicts the same pastoral idyll: there are flocks of sheep being steered by a lone rustic, a scattering of whitewashed tents, a humble matron pegging out the wash, a solitary puff of smoke from a chimney. Green is the dominant tone; tranquillity is the message. The composition bears no resemblance to the many descriptions of Ballarat on the brink of that crucial moment between 1853 and 1854—when Charles Evans walked into Ballarat—or indeed to the many doleful sketches that von Guérard completed when he actually lived there. Von Guérard’s painting is remarkable for its lyricism and elegance, but as history it’s a sham.
Close up, newcomers who had heard Ballarat before they saw it were more shocked than awed. Diarists and letter-writers recorded their first impressions of the sheer ugliness of the diggings. To Mrs Elizabeth Massey, the goldfields had the appearance of one vast cemetery with fresh made graves.23 Uncovered mine shafts pock-marked the surface, with mounds of earth heaped beside. By the beginning of 1854, Golden Point was, in the words of William Westgarth, an upturned, unsightly mass. There was not a tree or blade of grass to be seen. John James Bond travelled to the diggings after disembarking from the three-parts-starved Lady Flora in August 1853. [Ballarat] is an immense circular plain of mixed yellow and red earth, he recorded, every bit had been turned topsy-turvy. Alexander Dick, a Glaswegian teetotaller, was most struck by the Flat, that expanse of Ballarat East and its hub, the Eureka Lead. The Flat was covered with tents and ‘flies’ over mine shafts. Looked at from Golden Point or Black Hill the Flat was a perfect sea of calico and canvas.24 This description is more benign than most, but all emphasise the conquest of culture over nature, the bulldozer urgency of conquest.
The turnover from ancestral homeland to pastoral runs had happened quickly, but the transformation of Ballarat from sheep station to thriving frontier town struck like lightning. In October 1851, only a few months after the discovery of gold, one visitor described Ballarat as being like the encampment of an army. That is to say, it was orderly and peaceable, a neatly contained collection of simple tents with diggers methodically working the gully creeks.25 Before long, it was a riotous jumble of holes and mullock heaps.
One of the primary reasons for the sheer visual transformation of Ballarat by late 1853 was a shift in mining technology. In Ballarat, the shallow alluvial gold was quickly exhausted. But riches were still to be found below the deep basalt veins that followed ancient riverbeds under the surface. In fact, these deep lead deposits were larger and richer than ever found anywhere else in the world, but technological innovation was required to extract the exceptional nuggets. Deep sinking was the answer: a process by which ‘a forest was taken under ground’, as Weston Bate evocatively puts it. The subterranean shafts needed to be shored up, which meant great investments of time and labour, particularly to cut the timber slabbing for shaft supports. But the rewards could be magnificent. At some leads, an average of £2000 per claim was achieved for a period of several weeks running in 1853, and this was enough to entice punters to stick with the gamble of hand-digging shafts up to 160 feet deep for at least a year to come. But the whole pastime was costly in every respect, not least to the physical environment.26
Only at night, under the cover of darkness and after the ceremonial gunshot, did the pulse of activity gradually subside. A vast city hushed in the arms of night, the poetically inclined bureaucrat William Westgarth wrote from his vantage point at Bath’s Hotel on the township hill. Especially if it was a Sunday night, for on the Sabbath, a truce was called with the demonic striving.
Sunday in Ballarat was washing day. Scores of men could be seen in front of their tents with tin dish or bucket washing their weekly shirt and flannel, recalled Henry Mundy. As a rule Sunday mornings were bathed in a reverential quiet, the time, noted James Bonwick, consecrated to cookery. A roast joint or plum pudding might be enjoyed, damper almost certainly baked. It is here that the skill and economy of a woman are seen to advantage in a tent, wrote Bonwick.
And by the summer of 1853, women were thick on the ground. I did not fail to observe that the fair sex had ventured now on a large scale, wrote Italian miner Raffaello Carboni on his second trip to Ballarat, at Easter 1854. On Sundays, some women put on their finest shawls to promenade around town or prepared picnics to enjoy in the bush. In the afternoon, stump preachers would be out, walloping bibles and singing hymns. The tents that accommodated the Catholic and Wesleyan congregations were full, the only Christian denominations to gain a toehold by 1854. Jews mustered a healthy quorum at the Clarendon Hotel for their Friday night Shabbat.
Who ever dreams in England that there is even the semblance of religion in the gold fields? asked Mrs Massey, and yet amongst rough men, supposed to be the very scum of the earth, we found the Sunday more rigidly kept than in many far more civilised places. The Sabbath: a day of rest, a cessation of industry, a time to reflect on the spiritual and indulge the domestic. Maybe von Guérard had a Sunday in mind when he immortalised the calm and stillness of a Ballarat summer.
Von Guérard’s painting is accurate in at least one respect. Rising out of the ground like a flare was a remarkable circular tent, unlike any other structure on the diggings. This was Jones’ Circus.27 If weary travellers had left loved ones, crossed stormy seas and walked miles along a crooked road, surely here, finally, they would see the elephant. The Circus was both truth and metaphor. A fair dinkum illusion. For a shilling, you could be serenaded by a band of blackface minstrels, smudging their lily-white English skin with burnt cork. You could meet Signora Zephyrina, a Hobart girl, daughter of a housekeeper, who chose the free and easy vagabonding life [of] bohemia. (She borrowed her exotic name from a character out of a Madame de Staël novel.) You could see waxworks, wild beast shows, marionettes and dancing boys. You could watch a lion be tamed. You could ask Archie the Clown what it was like to be in Ballarat in the summer of 1853. He’d tell you it was a blast.
The tents, theatres, bowling alleys, dancing saloons and hotels, all filled with a noisy, rough, restless crowd, feverish with the excitement of the great battle with the earth for her treasures, and the feeling that something was going to happen. There was a general presentiment of impending danger. It was, to use a hackneyed simile, as if we were sleeping over a volcano that we knew must, sooner or later, burst forth.28
In Ballarat, it was all spangles and sawdust, old circus terms for good business and bad. On any given day, life could go either way.