It had not been a good year for the Nolan family of Monivea County, Galway. In 1846, the odds were stacked against carpenter Patrick Nolan and his wife, Margaret, a devout breeder of a dozen steel-eyed babes. First an old woman warned them the Nolan farm was built on a fairy path, then the cow died; by August, five-year-old James had suffered the same cruel fate. But still the pins kept falling. By 1849 eldest son Martin had taken the Queen’s shilling and although the British army kept him in hot meals, he couldn’t stomach his own rising gall. Martin soon deserted and fled back to the family farm, then gave himself up, fearing the repercussions if he were found. He was sent to India as penance.
These were the hungry years, the years of the Great Famine, and the Nolan family seemed as vulnerable to affliction as the mealy potatoes rotting in the ground. By 1851, nineteen-year-old Michael was on the run from the law for a different reason: he had refused to pay the family’s English landlord his crushing rent on the farm. In a frank discussion, the landlord’s agent had wound up with the prongs of Michael’s pitchfork lodged in his backside. Aided and abetted by twenty-year-old sister Bridget, eldest of the remaining Nolan clan, Michael weighed up his chances with the courts and took to the road.
That’s how, on 26 January 1852, Bridget and Michael Nolan found themselves standing on the docks at Birkenhead, about to board a ship bound for Geelong. On board the Mangerton, they met twenty-two-year-old Thomas Hynes, a farmer from County Clare, and thirty-year-old Patrick Gittins, a blacksmith and pike maker in his native Kilkenny. Less than two years later—on a honeycombed patch of dirt so remote it now seemed mythic—Bridget, Thomas and Patrick would forge a bond in blood.1
To comprehend what happened in Ballarat in the explosive year of 1854, we must first understand the tumult going on across the seas in the decade before that. It wasn’t simply greed or poverty that pulled so many people away from the centres of their known universe—whether Pennsylvania or Paris, Limerick or London—and thrust them into uncharted waters. There were many reasons to join the exodus to the New El Dorado, as Victoria soon became known.
The 1840s had been a decade of extreme economic, political and social turmoil in Europe. In Ireland from 1845 to 1852 over a million people died in an Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger). At least another million refugees fled, sparking an unprecedented mass migration to the New World. The famine had wreaked most of its havoc on Ireland, but the potato blight that triggered the catastrophe also caused crop devastation throughout Europe. A subsistence crisis drove peasants and the urban working poor to join the rising tide of middle-class political reform across Britain and Europe.
Campaigns for a variety of political reform measures culminated in 1848, which has been called the Year of Revolution or the Springtime of the Peoples. Motivated by ‘a chronic state of dissatisfaction’, as British historian Jonathan Sperber has termed it, popular mass uprisings swept through France, Germany, Britain and Russia, ousting monarchs and fracturing the customary accord between church and state. In Paris, the overthrow of Louis-Philippe ushered in the Second Republic. In Munich, revolutionary uprising culminated in the storming of the Zeughaus in March 1849, forcing the abdication of Ludwig I. Chartism, an English mass movement for social and political reform that demanded a widening of the franchise to include working people, saw thousands take to the streets. In July 1848, just five months after Louis-Philippe had been removed from the French throne, the British Government so feared a popular uprising from Chartist demonstrators—six million of whom had recently signed a petition—that Queen Victoria was evacuated to the Isle of Wight.
The extent of the crisis was summed up by an editorial in the London TIMES on 23 October 1851: England is threatened by two revolutions, the one political, the other social. The socialist, the extreme radical, are your true political bloomers. Just two months after gold was found beneath the pastoral runs of central Victoria, the British press was talking up the prospect of mass civic upheaval. But despite the widespread nature of radical discontent, the victories of 1848 were mostly short lived; the forces of conservatism successfully restored the political status quo.
Yet the TIMES editor was expressing another topical anxiety in his carefully chosen bloomer metaphor. 1848 was also the year that a group of middle-class women, headed by an indefatigable mother of six named Elizabeth Cady Stanton, met in Seneca Falls, New York to address the problem of women’s social and political oppression. Together these ‘doctors’ wives’—many of whom had cut their political teeth in the abolitionist movement, fighting to end slavery—penned the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, based on the American Declaration of Independence.
First and foremost, the document claimed the right of women to have a say in determining the laws that governed them. The women’s suffrage movement was born. (Early Chartists in England also endorsed equal voting rights for men and women in their push for universal electoral representation. By the late 1840s, however, leaders had lowered the bar in favour of the more politically expedient goal of manhood suffrage.2)
At the same time, women’s rights advocates on both sides of the Atlantic began a campaign of dress reform, advocating that political freedom should be expressed by emancipation from the sartorial constraints of corsets and crinolines, fashion items that not only distorted women’s bodies but also ruined their health. A Seneca Falls woman devised a new ‘rational dress’ outfit, comprising a long tunic worn over billowing pants that were gathered at the ankle. The outfit became known as the Bloomer costume, after editor Amelia Bloomer, who publicised the costume in her magazine, THE LILY. Bloomers became an international smash, with women’s rights advocates parading the costume in lecture tours across American and England. One such activist was English-born, French-educated, independently minded Caroline Dexter. Dexter became known as London’s ‘apostle of Bloomerism’ when she began lecturing to packed audiences in 1851.
Just at the moment the TIMES editor summed up the dual crisis facing England, news of the riches at Ballarat began to trickle into the press. In the eyes of many, Victoria would provide a place of social and political renewal where the stains of old-world enmity could be washed away. In 1852 Caroline Dexter’s idealist husband, William, left for the goldfields and two years later, Caroline too migrated permanently to Victoria.
For reform activists like the Dexters, Victoria was a political tabula rasa on which they might inscribe fresh ideas for the future, free from institutional and ideological impediments to progress.3 For renegades like Bridget and Michael Nolan, here now was the chance for a clean start, free from economic hardship and ethnic prejudice. By the time newspapers in London and New York began carrying daily reports of the material riches to be found in Victoria, a restless generation of young men and women was united by one great notion: liberty.
In London, the headquarters of radical activism was Clerkenwell. It was at St James Church in Clerkenwell, hotbed of Chartist unrest, that a Hampshire poet named Ellen Warboy chose to marry her beloved, Frederick Young, a chemist from Shoreditch, in 1837. In the same church, Sarah Anne McCullough married Henry Augustus Leicester Hanmer in 1844, their marriage witnessed by Sarah’s four-year-old daughter, Julia. These urban professionals and artists—with the exception of Henry, parted from the newly respectable Mrs Sarah Hanmer—would be in Ballarat by the beginning of 1854. A politically minded young Cornish man named Stephen Cuming and his wife, Jane, would join the caravan of progressive nonconformists. On 1 July 1848, the Cumings had christened their first daughter Martineau, after the liberal poet, writer and women’s rights campaigner, Harriet Martineau. All of these women—Ellen Young, Sarah Hanmer and Jane Cuming—would play a vital role in the political future of their adopted homeland.
It was not only the English middle class who were dissatisfied with their lot. Anastasia Hayes (née Butler), who travelled to Victoria on the same ship as Charles Evans, was a devout Catholic from Kilkenny who, despite being educated and capable of holding her own against institutional oppression, was tired of treading water. At the age of thirty-four, she and her husband Timothy—a Wexford-born engineer and oil merchant who had been prominent in the Young Ireland movement—bundled up their five children and left for Victoria. The Irish dissidents had already fled their homeland as early as 1847; two of their children were baptised in Staffordshire, England. From her position of maternal and cultural authority within the Catholic community in Ballarat, Anastasia would become critical to the events at Ballarat.
Catherine Sherwin was another Irish lass on the move, but her momentum drew on a different sense of exclusion. Catherine was born in 1831 in County Sligo, Ireland. Sligo is famed for its mountainous Atlantic coastline, its favourite son W.B. Yeats and its massive rates of emigration; almost half of the County’s population sailed from its renowned port between 1850 and the end of the nineteenth century. The Sherwin family was among the one per cent of Sligo’s Protestant population. Literate and ambitious, Catherine would soon discover that, as the prosperous Mrs Catherine Bentley, it was not so easy to leave her deeply ingrained outlier status behind.
English teacher and historian James Bonwick, who arrived in Australia in 1841, recognised that the disaffected and dispossessed of Europe would not readily check their grievances at the door:
Amongst the immigrants who were day after day pouring in from every quarter, there was no doubt many a chartist, many a democrat, escaped from the thralldom of aristocratic England, many a refugee and exile from the continent of Europe, who came in search not only of gold but of a refuge from the soul-and-body-grinding despotism of Europe.
The revolutions ripping at the fabric of Europe were not seamlessly elided in Victoria; rather, the ideas, aspirations and language of the old world seeped into the porous new cultural and political landscape. Seen from this angle, the Victorian gold rush doesn’t represent a new dawn in Australia’s young history so much as the long dusk of Europe’s age of revolutions. Travelling south, the gold rush immigrants were sailing neither into nor away from the sunset. It would be their fate to be forever caught between old world antagonisms and new world expectations.
It was impossible not to have great expectations. The pull towards Victoria was overwhelming, the allure fervently communicated by the first arrivals of late 1851 and early 1852. These men and women sent heartfelt letters home to family members, wrote correspondents’ reports for newspapers and published literary accounts of their travels. The WILTS AND GLOUCESTERSHIRE STANDARD regularly published letters from successful emigrants. One ‘Elizabeth’ had written to her mother: I hope that all my brothers and sisters that are eligible for a free passage will apply immediately and be sure to apply as farm servants or dairymaids and they will be certain of a free passage to this our adopted country, the land of plenty.4
The ‘land of plenty’ allegory is a common theme in these early reports. Victoria was the Promised Land and Ballarat, a Christian emigration society confidently announced in its promotional literature, is the Ararat on which the ark of Victoria rested, and saved the colony. Seventeen-year-old Scotsman Alexander Dick sought a new, free and better life and deliverance from what I regarded as servile bondage. Fanny Davis, an assisted immigrant from England, thought that as her ship prepared to depart: We must have looked very much like the Children of Israel going out of Egypt.5
Indeed, Fanny’s reference to Exodus 3:1—God’s decree to Moses to lead his people away out of affliction into the land flowing with milk and honey—explains a great deal about the aspirations of those immigrants in flight. The impending journey to Victoria was not simply about the lust for gold. The gold seekers were not sinners, but innocents abroad. Dreamers. Visionaries. Refugees. Like Alexander Dick, they sought deliverance.
The story of Victoria’s gold dovetailed perfectly with the global liberation narrative that expressed the spirit of the times. If repression was the lock, gold was the key.
The picture painted of Victoria worldwide was as a land paved with gold, a yellow brick road to unlimited opportunity. Newspapers around the globe printed endless statements of gold returns, enumerating the breathtaking value of the gold in private hands, Melbourne banks and diggers’ pockets. On 8 April 1852, the London TIMES reported the astonishing results achieved over the past three months: £730,242 worth of gold and where it is to end no human being can guess. The field is reported to be illimitable. This correspondent pressed readers to hurry to the land where boundless plenty smiles side by side with countless wealth. Just three months later, the total value of gold thus far found in Victoria was £1,647,810.
The promise of instant wealth is perennially attractive—as the vice-like grip of poker machines and lotteries on the pockets of today’s punters still demonstrates—but how much more compelling when there are eye-witnesses to the Midas miracle:
[Gold] lies on the surface and after a shower of rain, you may see it with the naked eye, and a child can put in a spade, and dig that with his little hands in one minute, which many of you in England wear out eyes and heart in getting.
That’s how MURRAY’S GUIDE TO THE GOLD DIGGINGS, published in London in 1852, depicted the situation on the ground. Gold digging was simply child’s play.
MURRAY’S GUIDE drew on a series of anecdotes to present a true account for prospective diggers. Like other guidebooks that promoted the attractions of the goldfields—the healthy air, beautiful scenery and the glow of animal enjoyment peculiar to bush life—MURRAY’S particularly encouraged fathers of large families to come, sowing the seed of aspiration in those husbands who, perhaps, had failed to bring home sufficient bacon in Manchester, Edinburgh or Cardiff. It was a well-publicised image: the victorious father arriving back in the mother country to a grateful wife and adoring children waiting patiently by the hearth.
According to John Capper, a man’s children were, in England, dead weights around his progress, but a true blessing in Australia. Digger-turned-merchant Robert Caldwell agreed. I enjoy the satisfaction of providing well for my family through my own exertions, he wrote in his reminiscences, a satisfaction I could never have felt in England.
By late 1854, the time young William McLeish’s family made the decision to try their luck in Victoria, British households were also suffering the material and psychological effects of the Crimean War. Many of the working class found it a hard matter to obtain regular employment, recalled William. Though the departing McLeish family was surrounded by weeping friends who all believed they were bidding us a final good-bye, which indeed they were, the promised restoration of masculine pride through honest toil beckoned like the Pied Piper.
Notions of ‘manliness’ were linked to another important incentive to gold seeking: independence. In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, manliness was a racialised concept imbued with assumptions about the civility of true British manhood, as against the brute stupidity or innate slovenliness of lesser beings.6 For the labouring class, manliness was predicated on improving one’s situation in life, and rested largely on the ability to become self-employed, and eventually self-made.
It is thus not surprising that the guarantee of autonomy resonates persistently in the letters of new immigrants to the family and neighbours they’d left behind. James Green conveyed this sentiment in a note to his sister, written on 24 July 1853, that answered her enquiry as to whether their brother George should also ‘come out’. Come here by all means, entreated James; a few years here and he would be an independent man, he is very simple if he stops at home digging potatoes when he might come here and dig gold.
Robert Caldwell similarly emphasised the perfect freedom and thorough independence of a gold digger’s life, particularly for the youth of energy, adventure and courage. Samuel Mossman evoked the image of a poor labourer and his family huddled around the embers of a miserable fire, surviving a northern winter, unable to improve his living conditions. In Australia, by contrast, there was no snow and fuel was cheap and abundant. It’s the poor man’s country, Mossman declared, what independence would surround them! In Australia want and penury is unknown, daylight and darkness, heat and cold, are more equally distributed throughout the seasons. Mossman steered clear of biblical allusion but referenced other mythological tales. Many Britons came to Australia as sickly and downcast, he argued, but under the bright southern sun and wholesome air the weak man rallied. With health and strength before him, like a young Hercules, he commences the world anew.
Images of heroic self-sufficiency reinforced the image of boundless personal space, both physical and psychic, to be found in Victoria. I don’t think I could breathe there now, said one Englishman of his motherland, it’s always—you must do this, or you must not do that…it would fairly drive me mad.7
The abolitionist movement had successfully campaigned to end slavery in the British Empire in 1833. Now a new generation was proclaiming that this was a time for white men to break free of their bonds, whether to exploitative employers, irksome family or a tyrannical state. The land they are going to is neither formal nor exclusive, wrote one booster, working men need no introduction beyond industry and aptitude. Employers take no account of pedigree.
For a man beaten down by generations of class consciousness, this chance to stand tall and proud, regardless of the cut of his cloth, seemed nothing short of redemptive. Australia may well be considered the Paradise of Working Men, struggling fathers and superfluous sons were told. The Sweat of the brow—the timeworn badge of labour—bears with it no stamp of servitude, and to the patient worker success is no problem. For all willing hands there is labour, and for all labour there is liberal reward.8
Historian David Goodman, in his classic comparative study of gold digging in Victoria and California, has persuasively elucidated what he calls the ‘colonial narrative’—the story that contemporaries told about the effects of gold on society. One of the most significant elements of this story, Goodman argues, was ‘the depiction of the human relationship to the environment as one of struggle and conquest, a relationship which allowed scope for masculine heroism’. Goodman understands the colonial narrative as ‘a male story’ because men’s triumph over their circumstances—material and social—tapped into an atavistic desire for mastery.
But could this idea have appeal for women also? Did it have a particular appeal? This letter from Lucy Hart, written to her mother in England in May 1852, illustrates that autonomy was highly prized by women, too.
I would not come back to England again unless I had enough to keep me without work on no account. Neither would my husband. I am speaking now the very sentiments of our hearts, but people must be saving, industrious and persevering. We have deprived ourselves of many things we might have had, but what was it for? All to try to do something for ourselves so that my husband should not always work under a Master, and happy I am to inform you that we have gained that point, he is now his own master.
Lucy’s letter, like most personal correspondence and ship journals, would have been read out aloud at gatherings and passed around among family members, friends and acquaintances.9 It would have become precious cultural capital, impressing other women with its pungent whiff of satisfaction, almost defiance. Its message: wives in Victoria could enjoy the ancillary benefits of a proud, upright husband and mutual reward for family labours.
But it’s also clear that women were promoting the advantages of autonomy for their own personal fulfilment. May Howell wrote ardently of life at the diggings:
I dare say it is an independent life, trusting to yourself, putting forth all your energy, no leaning on others, no one to control, or dictate to you, going where you like, doing what you like, no relation laying down the law, and chalking out your path in life.
Forty-two-year-old Mary Spencer, sailing on the Arabian, felt no ambivalence or anxiety as she looked back over her shoulder at the receding shore of her homeland. As her ship diary reveals, she saw only the miraculous prospect of liberation from suffocating drawing rooms and the endless minutiae of genteel etiquette. Mary revelled in the starry nights on deck with everyone happy, no jarring world of cares to disturb us. Her only woe was that there was so little to write about: happiness is quiet and uninteresting in its detail. For both men and women, the heady assumption of self-governance would come to have major socio-political implications once they reached the diggings.
MURRAY’S GUIDE held another prophetic image. This one relied on neither the promise of male breadwinning nor the intoxication of personal liberation. It involved the companionable mutuality of young husbands and wives making a new start together. This vision encouraged women to become the driving force behind emigration. Wives should not allow their husbands to go without them if they have passage money for both was the message, an inducement for women to assert command over proceedings. Other commentators exhorted women to come to the goldfields to act as a stimulant to many fathers’ yearning heart in this motley multitude. Women, declared the ILLUSTRATED AUSTRALIAN MAGAZINE of September 1851, would give a dash of humanity to the broad outline of savageism [sic] that emerges when men congregate in sexual isolation.
The concept of women as civilising agents is endemic to transnational colonial history. According to this ideology, women are seen as agents of conservative restoration, bringing virtue to rough-and-ready frontier outposts. These angels of the imperial hearth would fulfil their ‘natural’ role in sweeping aside the detritus of frontier living, taming men with wholesome marriages, bearing children to send to nascent schools, and holding together a moral universe in which charity and benevolence would smooth the jagged edges of corruption and greed.
Nonconformist teacher and historian James Bonwick was chief proselytiser of the ‘God’s Police’ archetype on the goldfields. It’s a paradigm he laid out in his AUSTRALIAN GOLD DIGGER’S MONTHLY MAGAZINE AND COLONIAL FAMILY VISITOR, a magazine that ran from October 1852 to May 1853, sold in Melbourne and on the diggings, and sent back to be shared among family members and friends. To Bonwick, Victoria’s golden gullies were the gift of a God of gracious Providence and he erected a special pedestal for women in his idealised rural scene. Bonwick wrote of the sources of satisfaction that awaited women who, with their husbands, set up happy, virtuous homes of honest toil. In the edition for February 1853, Bonwick described a pleasant weekend visit to Ballarat, where no gold district has been so eminently rich as Eureka.
At no other diggings [was I] so struck with its order, propriety and comfort…The Sunday was strictly observed. A few parasols, veils and private arm-in-arm couples were encountered on our ramble. Many domestic scenes gave us a lively pleasure; as, the digger nursing his little babe, a mother reading to her children, family groups beneath bough porches, a roguish, tiny fellow pouring water into a plate for his puppy, a girl enticing a cow to be milked, with divers polka-jackets flitting to and fro in household duty.
It’s not exactly Dodge City. Bonwick here imposes a pastoral idyll that historian Graeme Davison has called the heart of England, a rhapsodic place of cultivated farmlands and compliant social relations.10 This is the antithesis of Dickensian London, with its crowded streets, hungry waifs, toothless crones and worn-out factory fodder. But it’s not the American Wild West either—all knife fights, saloon whores and lawless degeneracy. No, Bonwick’s new frontier is the staging post of wholesome women, whose presence is the harbinger, not only of comfort, but of moral progress.
Was Bonwick aware of any contradiction between this smug polka-dotted duty and May Howell’s vision of independence? The English rural idyll would prove to have little in common with Victoria’s sunburnt hinterland, and even less relevance to its early intake of remarkably recalcitrant ladies.
It was not only pious ideologues who were promoting the advantages of female immigration to the goldfields. In September 1854, immigration agent Edward Bell reported to the colonial government on the success of its own recruitment drive:
It will be gratifying to your Excellency to remark, that the recommendation of the late Lieutenant Governor, Mr La Trobe, that a large number of females should be imported in order to check the manifest disproportion in the sexes, consequent on the enormous addition to the male population which resulted from the opening of the Gold Fields in 1851, have been carefully attended by Her Majesty’s Commissioners; and that the number of women, female children, and infants introduced, nearly doubles the number of males. The introduction of single men, except grown sons in large families, has been abandoned.
Bell’s returns for 1853 reveal that 9342 females (of all ages) received assisted passage, compared to 5236 males. (By contrast, of the 77,734 unassisted passengers, 54,800 were adult men and 12,277 were adult women. The rest were children more or less equally spread between the sexes.) Demographic studies by historians have shown that this unprecedented pool of female government emigrants was largely drawn from small-farm and small-town environments, where extensive recruiting was carried out for young single women. A disproportionate number came from Ireland: between 1848 and 1860, fifty-one per cent of single immigrant women to Victoria were Irish.11 English and Scottish girls proved more reluctant to leave established family circles and stable domestic service arrangements.
Much depended on the girl’s place in the family. If an older (or younger) sister could stay behind to look after aging parents, then a spare daughter might see herself free. Some, like the letter-writer ‘Elizabeth’, became the family or village scout, judging the prospects before encouraging other siblings, aunts, cousins and neighbours to apply for passage. One lucky girl, who found work on an outstation near Geelong as a well-remunerated wet-nurse, wrote to her family: I wish you were all here, there is room for you all, and wages too. By such entreaties the process of chain migration began. Such refugees from the depressed economic and social landscape of Great Britain had no intention of making a return voyage.
Letters such as this one often ended up in the guidebooks for immigrants to Victoria that were a publishing phenomenon after 1852. These books recorded base wages for all grades of domestic servant and labourer, information on what to bring to the colony (mattress, bolster, blankets; knife, fork and mug) and, for single women, assessments of the marriage market. Of the roughly 7000 adult women who came as assisted emigrants in 1853, 4500 were single and 2500 were married. The average family size among the married emigrants was 1.5 children, which indicates the youth of the new arrivals: it was not uncommon for women of the time to bear seven or more children. A surprisingly large proportion was literate; only 2500 could neither read nor write, and this category included children and infants. (Even Edward Bell remarked on the unprecedented level of schooling among assisted emigrants.) Women were, clearly, making educated choices. The guidebooks, like the English journals of the time, were full of the scarcity of wives and excellent matches sure to be made in Australia, where happy prosperous homes could be created to erase the memory of lives of struggling adversity at home. The worst emigrants, all agreed, were those genteel paupers with little money and much pride. This for the simple reason that the wealth of a colonist lies in work. Similarly, young unmarried women intending to be brides but with no experience of working were advised to stay put:
The drawing-room accomplishments of singing, dancing, painting and crochet would stand no shadow of a chance against the highly-prized virtues of churning, baking, preserving, cheese-making and similar matters.
The above examples, and the letter from our happy wet-nurse, all appear in PHILLIPS’ EMIGRANTS’ GUIDE TO AUSTRALIA, written by John Capper and published in Liverpool in 1855. The guidebooks were intended to be of practical value but there was also an imperial agenda. Colonial expansion required skilled migrants, male and female.
The British Government wasn’t the only party with an interest in Victoria’s extraordinary new attraction for the world’s voluntary nomads. There were fortunes to be made from the traffic in human mobility: the costs of relocation and provisioning, the revenue generated by labour and taxes. The Colonial Office paid handsomely to reduce its surplus population through assisted immigration; private citizens also boosted the bank balances of the shipping magnates who were quickly (and cheaply) converting their ships to carry people instead of goods. There was a middle ground, too, between government assistance and commercial travel: the philanthropic societies to which a prospective immigrant could apply for financial aid to secure passage.
The Family Colonisation Loan Society established by the enterprising Caroline Chisholm, the woman on Australia’s first issue five-dollar banknote, is the best known of the philanthropic organisations. Chisholm’s endeavour to populate the inland of Australia with honest and industrious women who could infuse bush society with permanent prosperity began in 1840. To break up the bachelor stations is my design, Mrs Chisholm intoned, happy homes my reward. With the discovery of gold, Chisholm, now forty-four years old and wise to the vagaries of life under colonial conditions, saw the opportunity to extend her scheme to those families which could not afford passage and did not qualify for government assistance (because of the age or number of children). Keeping families together was her aim. Over three thousand immigrants were sponsored by the Family Colonisation Loan Society between 1852 and 1854.
An alternative solution was for a group of eager but impecunious emigrants—neighbours or acquaintances—to get together and charter a ship. Guidebooks often discouraged intending migrants from looking to patronage or poor law guardians, or Government, for help, counselling them to form local committees and do the work for themselves. The ethic of self-help was strong among some communities, notably the Scots, whose religious or moral code disposed them to earn the rights and privileges of prosperity rather than being handed a better life on a platter. Here the covenant was struck between the parish or civic organisations that acted as benefactors and the recipients of that local largesse; wealth would flow back to the community in gratitude for its faith. Alexander Dick aligned himself to the Christian and Temperance Emigration Society, a joint stock association, which planned to buy a 470-tonne ship that could carry 250 passengers and sell it at the end of the voyage. Dick characterised his fellow travellers as an interesting and virtuous band of voluntary exiles…run by a coterie of goody goody teetotallers and Methodists…a kind of modern Argonauts. Still a teenager, Dick was delighted to find that his ship was full of intemperate young men like himself.
Chinese immigrants also favoured the self-help model. They formed triads—a culturally distinct form of friendly society—to send family and community members to Victoria. Immigration agent Bell’s report noted that a very large, though I fear not very profitable, addition to our population is now almost daily arriving from China. Up to 30 June 1854, according to Bell, no fewer than 2895 male Chinese had landed in Melbourne…and as rapidly removed to the Gold Fields. Their women, Bell noted, never emigrate. (Bell was equally dismayed by the high number of Catholic immigrants from Ireland, a country he believed was relieving a parish of its paupers.) Bell would no doubt have been apoplectic to learn that by 1857 the Chinese population in Victoria would peak at 25,000.12
The majority of Chinese immigrants to Victoria came from one region, Guangdong Province, where they were largely involved in agrarian pursuits. Many were uninterested in cultural adaptation, even if the culture had been inclined to assimilate them, regarding Europeans as uncivilised and inferior beings—spiritual and cultural barbarians.13 Chinese diggers hung together. They maintained close-knit social relations, both informally and in community organisations such as the See Yup Society.
Historian Anna Kyi has argued too that Chinese gold diggers can be characterised as having a ‘sojourning mentality’; that is, their aspiration was to amass a quick fortune and return home to their wives and elders with wealth and respect.
The Chinese readily acknowledged that this was their primary motivation; most didn’t want a fresh start, but a way to improve their financial, familial and social status at home. But leaders of the Chinese community were also eager to dispel the near hysteria that surrounded the fact that no Chinese women accompanied the male sojourners. A petition to the government written in 1857, protesting against a poll tax on Chinese arrivals, gave an explanation for this situation.
The Chinese on first coming to this gold field thought the English very kind then the Chinese were glad to come digging gold and delighted in the mercy manifested. Now we learn that the news-papers complain that we Chinamen bring no wives and children to this country. Our reason is that we wish to leave some of the family to look after our aged parents as the climate there is very rough; our women too are not like English women, when they go into ships they cannot walk or stand and we cannot afford the passage money…as soon as we get a little money we will try to get home to our aged parents for our ancient books teach us that we must look after our parents.14
Another ethnic group prominent on the diggings, Jewish immigrants, were among the first to grasp the potential of Victoria for changing personal and collective fortunes. Long debarred from full commercial and civic participation, Jews from England and continental Europe hoped that in Victoria they would be free to integrate with mainstream society without compromising their cultural identity. In September 1853, the Family Colonisation Loan Society sent a boatload of passengers to Victoria, including a large party of girls recruited by the London Jewish Ladies’ Benevolent Society on behalf of the Jews of Ballarat. They sailed on a newly built ship, making its maiden voyage: the Caroline Chisholm.
Echoing on both sides of the Atlantic, and reverberating through continental Europe and across Asia, there was one clear, resounding message. Fabulous wealth, a healthier, happier life, self-respect and limitless freedom were yours for the price of passage or your mark on a government paper. Whether you chose to come to the mountain, dig, make your pile and stay; or come, dig, make your pile and hightail it home, the route was unambiguous and unobstructed. The attraction was potent. The doomsayers were few.
But even in the early days of the miraculous gold rush, there was more realistic writing on the walls if you chose to read it. Dysentery, cholera and ophthalmalgia are rife, and committing dreadful ravages, testified the DAILY ALTA in April 1852. By July 1853 the DAILY ALTA conveyed reports of deceptions practised in England to induce emigration to the colonies. In Britain too, some journalists warned emigrants not to be deluded by exaggerated claims of prosperity. Miserable homes, rags and filth, wives savagely beaten, children deserted and starved, warned the London TIMES in October 1853, all the evils to be found in the overcrowded centres of Europe may be seen in as great a proportion here. Even some guidebooks were apprehensive about the possible backlash against a colonisation project based on flights of fancy. Should the emigrants suffer privation, if they could not obtain from the stubborn soil sufficient for mere subsistence, let alone indulge in the refinements they have been accustomed to, Samuel Mossman warned, there would be untold distress for those charged with governing these people. The starved will revolt against all the laws of God and man however stringent.
If the dream of independence was but a chimera—just wait and see moral man revert into that of retrograde nature. The spectre of savageism. The perils of a mixed multitude too hungry to keep its covenant.