When the Lady Flora sailed into harbour in the spring of 1853, it was less than three short years since the Port Phillip District had been separated from its parent colony of New South Wales. Victoria officially became an autonomous colony on 1 July 1851, a month before gold changed its fortunes forever. Charles La Trobe was Victoria’s first lieutenant governor, overseeing a town of fledgling institutions, a hinterland squired by a self-selected landed gentry (the ‘squattocracy’) and a measly 23,143 inhabitants.
Compared to sin-city Sydney, which had more than double the population, Melbourne before the gold rush was a country cousin. The inter-colonial influx following the discovery of gold, with a tsunami of immigrants hot on its heels, started an overnight boom in Melbourne. The mantle of inferiority was quickly thrown off, and Melbourne revelled in a carnival-like upheaval. According to John D’Ewes, a civil servant whose name would be forged in the fires of Eureka, the streets wore a very holiday appearance.1
By the census of April 1854, the city of Melbourne and its neighbouring seaport towns (Sandridge, Williamstown) recorded a population of some 65,000 males and 45,000 females. That represents a near five-fold increase in a mere three years. Just imagine if Melbourne’s present-day population of 3.8 million quintupled to almost twenty million in less time than it takes to build, say, an Olympic stadium. Add to this phenomenal explosion the 52,000 males and 14,000 females packed onto the goldfields, which did not even exist when the census was taken in 1851, and the 49,000 males and 30,000 females in inland towns and districts including Geelong: this was a colony heaving under the weight of its own success. By August 1854, there were over 115,000 men, women and children on the goldfields alone. The official figures did not include the ‘dying race’ of Aborigines (estimated to be around 2500, a fraction of the 25,000 likely to have occupied the Port Phillip district prior to European occupation) or the Chinese, neither of whom were considered worth counting.
Like other cities that grow by magic, wrote American gold seeker Dan Calwell to his sisters at home in Ohio, most of the buildings are temporary and they are already giving place to more capacious and costly ones. Dan and his brother Davis had spent almost five months sailing from New York, arriving in the spring of 1853. The quietness of ship life, wrote Dan, was superseded by the noise and confusion of a second Babel. Melbourne reeked of wide-open possibilities, and the Calwell boys, only twenty and twenty-one years old, couldn’t wait to cross the line that separated the mundane from the electrifying.
Nothing stayed still for long: taking a census at the feverish height of a gold rush was like trying to herd cats. The only piece of empirical data that refused to budge was the disproportion of the sexes: 193 males to every hundred females—a fact, said the statisticians, that can scarcely fail to attract the attention of the legislature. There was one demographic detail that was universally acknowledged. The proportion of people in the prime of life, aged between twenty and forty, was substantially higher than in Great Britain or in any other colony. Victoria’s population was overwhelmingly young, male and mobile.
It was also surprisingly cosmopolitan, with all the associations of excitement and glamour, the sinuous interplay between cultures this sexy word conjures. Here is British merchant Robert Caldwell’s pen picture of the populace of Melbourne:
a most curious and picturesque exhibition of the people of all nations…the swart Briton walks shoulder to shoulder with the flat-faced Chinaman, the tall and stately Armenian, the lithe New Zealander or South Sea Islander, the merry African from the United States, the grave Spaniard, the yellow-haired German, the tall, sharp visaged Yankee, and the lively Frenchman. Every state in the world has its representatives
Among the religious denominations represented in Victoria, the 1854 census recorded three thousand Mahometans and Pagans. By the end of the year that figure had risen to ten thousand, about half of whom were Chinese.2 On the other hand, noted Caldwell with little sense of alarm, the wild animals and native inhabitants seem to have almost melted away.
Commentators often noted the degree of dissimilarity, if not overt hostility, between the diverse ethnic groups, particularly the English and the Americans. Robert Caldwell believed the most troublesome part of the population came from America while the most depraved hailed from Britain via the Californian goldfields, where they had picked up the worst of American vices. The Americans’ political creed, said Caldwell, was to condemn everything British and with ignorant effrontery on British soil, to uphold as perfect everything American. American Silas Andrews noted that the populace was a mixture of all nations, mostly English of the lowest class, possessing none of that activity and capability of turning their hands to anything, which the ‘Yankees’ possess. At the boarding house where Thomas and Frances Pierson, from the Pennsylvania Olive Lodge, eventually found a place to stay, there were three tables set up in the dining room: one was the Britishers table, another the Yankey table, and a third the Experienced Colonials table. We are accustomed to understanding anglophone ethnic tensions in Australia as an immemorial turf war between the English and Irish, but there was more than a hint of the Boston Tea Party about the parlours of 1850s Melbourne.
Where did Sarah Hanmer seat herself? Born into the McCullough clan in Scotland, Sarah was Anglo-Celtic. But like another actress of her generation, Lola Montez, Sarah had travelled to America during the Californian gold rush. In 1850, she was living in Albany, New York, raising enough capital to put herself in pole position when the magnetic pull of gold exerted its southward traction. Later, in Ballarat, Sarah would show that her allegiances were surprisingly Yankey.
Gold rush Melbourne—gateway to the diggings—was a city reeling. In the year following the first gold discoveries it became a virtual ghost town. The reports in the papers drove every one mad, wrote Henry Mundy, who had emigrated to Australia as a boy in 1844, every shepherd, hutkeeper, stockrider, every man, woman and child. All the world and his wife were looking for and examining quartz. Crews (and even captains) abandoned their ships in the harbour, leaving nothing more than a forest of masts, as Alexander Dick described the Port of Melbourne. Construction sites were frozen in time, primed with potential but no labour to see it through. Postal services were disrupted. The police force was gutted. Roads could not be built for the lack of navvies. Schools closed and the public service staggered along on a skeleton staff. And husbands notoriously deserted their wives, creating the legendary grass widows of the gold rush, the discarded victims of male caprice. Some women expected their husbands to reappear with a pocketful of gold; others knew they were gone for good.
A year later, many of the original fugitives had returned, having either made their pile or realised there was now a more reliable and less backbreaking fortune to be made servicing the boatloads of immigrants being daily disgorged onto Melbourne’s shores. Carpenters, stonemasons and other artisans found their skills were suddenly at a premium. Dubious lawyers and uncertified doctors, who had come to Australia to dig for wealth, discovered that their professional practices were lucrative regardless of talent or qualification. A publican’s licence was a sure route to prosperity.
The social condition of the colony, and especially the city of Melbourne, wrote John Capper in his popular guidebook of 1854, becomes every day more complicated and unmanageable. Regulation of rents, prices, wages, sanitation and labour practices was a dream of the late nineteenth century’s progressive thinkers. In the early 1850s, the guiding principle was adaptation, not control. By November 1853, on the eve of their departure for Ballarat and over a year since Charles and George Evans had stepped off the boat, George amused himself with the array of ventures he and his equally educated brother had embarked upon:
Verily we have now got all the irons, poker, tongs and all: let me see, what are we? Confectioners, cooks, booksellers, dealers in cordials, fruiterers, lodging housekeepers, hay horners, storekeepers, carters, dealers in timber, et et et et
No one knew the value of adaptability better than women. What was needed in Victoria, far more than fine garments, letters of introduction and sterling protocols, wrote Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye in her advice manual for prospective female immigrants, is a smiling face, and a firm determination never to look on the shady side of the picture but to make the very best of every cross, accident or discomfort. There was no doubt that Melbourne was a pick-yourself-up, dust-yourself-off sort of a place.
It was also, thanks to the combination of dislocation and new money, a place of intoxicating experimentation. Commentators had endless fun describing the peculiarities of local dress. Diggers, draymen and labourers, reported Robert Caldwell, had adopted the ‘uniform’ of blue flannel shirt, brass-buckled belt, straw hat, knee-high boots and colourful neckchief. Large gold rings and flowing beards were also popular. It was a worker’s costume, but adopted by all walks of life as a symbol of colonial authenticity. William Kelly, who had been in California before arriving in Australia in 1853, observed that in Melbourne it was de rigueur to dispense with coats, gloves and bell-toppers, and that the scorecard on neckties vs. bare necks was fifty-fifty. Kelly also enjoyed describing the attire of Melbourne’s women who, he said, were addicted to flowers and corn-stalks worn in their bonnets. They also exhibited a passion for parasols (quite sensible, one would think, in the Australian sunshine). Warming to his topic, Kelly described how the gentler portion of the [female] community stayed indoors while the women who walked out in public were the strong-minded class…
striking but unattractive women [who] jostled you on the flagways, elbowed you in the shops, and rattled through the streets in carriages hired at a guinea an hour, arrayed in flaunting dresses of the most florid colours, composed of silks, sarcenets and brocaded satins.
For Kelly, the most amusing detail of all was what these promenading women wore on their feet. Dressed to kill, they buried their tiny feet and tapering ankles in lumbering Wellingtons.
The journalist Charles Lyall had another expression for the peculiarities of women’s dress in Victoria. The prevailing costume of the Ladies, he wrote, is the chacun a son gout style. The French phrase translates as ‘each to his own’, expressing individuality of taste or choice. John Capper put the strange antics of Melbourne’s women down to the fact that many of the young wives had never seen money before, hence the fashion for white satin, ostrich feathers and pearls, which they exhibited proudly while refreshing themselves with a pot of half-and-half. The women of Melbourne might have been lampooned for their gaucheries, but they relished the opportunity to experiment with unorthodox appearances. For those women who were proceeding to the diggings, such aesthetic adventures were good preparation for the journey ahead.
The explosion in Melbourne’s growth had far-reaching effects, and many immigrants, particularly those with families, were disheartened by what they saw when they left the relative security of their ship. The search for decent lodgings was the first challenge. Single young men like the Calwells could bed down in any nook or cranny, but fathers struggled to find accommodation for their dependants. Solomon Belinfante, a Jamaican-born London Jew of Portuguese Sephardic ancestry, arrived on the luxurious Queen of the South in June 1854, the same journey that brought Governor La Trobe’s replacement, Sir Charles Hotham, to his new home. Solomon had been assured a room in Melbourne by one of his brethren. He went ashore with his pregnant, twenty-one-year-old, Jamaican-born wife Ada, their infant daughter Rebecca and her nursemaid, after a comfortable seventy-eight days at sea under steam power. We had lunch in a miserable place called Sandridge, wrote Belinfante, aged forty, in his diary, then walked to the omnibus ankle deep in mud…heartily sick of the Cohen promises to engage lodgings…heartily disgusted with the place. Ada and Solomon soon settled in Collingwood, where he became a commercial broker and she got on with the business of having eleven more children.3
Genteel Martha Clendinning had a similarly tough time of finding lodgings. Thirty-two-year-old Martha was a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, raised in Kings County. As a daughter of the Protestant Ascendancy class, it was fitting that she married a doctor sixteen years her senior. By the time Martha and her husband, George, arrived in Melbourne, they had already endured a long and monotonous voyage from England that ended in a calamitous shipwreck in Port Phillip Bay, just off Queenscliff. All the steerage passengers lost their entire belongings in the hold and lower deck, but the Clendinnings, in a first-class berth, got off lightly. They did lose their digging tools and almost lost their tent, which later became their Ballarat home for two years. But in Melbourne, Martha, her seven-year-old daughter, Margaret, and her sister, Sarah Lloyd, eventually found a room to rent—also in Collingwood—in the house of the well known vocalist, Mrs Tester. George Clendinning and Sarah’s husband stayed at a pub, sleeping atop a billiard table.
At this stage, the suburb of Collingwood had no roads and the stumps of newly felled gum trees poked out of the ground. A four-foot-high gum stub protruded right at the entrance to the doctor’s wife’s new abode. Martha marvelled at the happy-go-lucky spirit of her young daughter who remained free from all the anxieties and fears for the future that pressed on her parents. The girl was perfectly happy, wrote Martha in her memoirs, and enjoyed all the changes and chances we had passed through. She probably slept well at night, too, unlike Martha, who found sleep impossible. It wasn’t just apprehension that kept her awake; her restlessness was also owing to the crowds of mosquitoes that attacked us. Everyone complained about the mosquitos. Some newcomers reacted so badly to the insects’ stings that they had to be hospitalised. And when they were not being monstered by mosquitos, neophyte Victorians were driven mad by flies.4
But if insects were irritating, there was a more menacing scourge. Colonial fever was a quaint name for a hideous disease: typhus, spread by head lice, and characterised by headaches, chills and the foul smell of rotting bodily fluids. It was sometimes known as putrid fever. Colonial fever was exacerbated by overcrowding and poor hygiene. It took out young and old, hearty and sickly alike, and it frightened even the Pollyannas among the immigrants. Women were known to shave their pubic hair to diminish the chances of lice infestation. To add to the lethal mix, influenza, scarlet fever, measles, tuberculosis and whooping cough all became endemic in Victoria in the 1850s, associated with high immigration, high birth rate and congested living conditions.
The housing shortage underlay many of Melbourne’s social woes. Real estate prices had dropped in Melbourne when the town was emptied following the first gold discoveries, but now the rush was on to accommodate the daily delivery of new souls. All manner of temporary structures were erected to serve as lodging houses; so much the better if you could get a liquor licence and call it a hotel. Not surprisingly, disease spread like wildfire through these unsanitary and overcrowded hostelries. In 1854, the Legislative Council took action and passed the Act for the Well-Ordering of Common Lodging Houses, which required landlords and their houses to be registered and inspected for cleanliness and ventilation. The latter was theoretically easy in a wide-open country. The former was virtually impossible in a city that would not get a sewerage system until the 1890s. Lodging houses were also supposed to keep the unmarried sexes segregated. Like the ships captains, on this score the city fathers were truly beating against the wind.
Frances and Thomas Pierson could find neither a lodging house nor a hotel room. After debarking from the Ascutna, they pitched a tent on the beach at Sandridge. Hundreds more were doing the same thing. The beach was reduced to a campsite hugging the shore. One day soon after the Piersons’ arrival, a hideous summer gale blew a hurricane for fourteen hours without reprieve. The sand flew in clouds thicker than I ever saw it snow, wrote Thomas. The sand stuck to the perspiration that dripped from their exposed skin. All our faces was so black, Thomas spat, you actually could not tell a black man from a white one. It took the Piersons two months to locate their more permanent accommodation in Collingwood. Thomas’s antipathy did not abate with a roof over his head. Frances was too unwell, suffering from the debilitating dysentery that racked new arrivals. After witnessing several neighbours die of colonial fever, he wrote in his diary, This is a very unhealthy place—all a Lie that we were told in History or the papers. Thomas Pierson was scared for his wife’s declining health and felt mightily ripped off. He was not reserving judgment on Australia: This is the most God forsaken accursed country I could conceive of.
Even more desolate for some: those too poor or unlucky to find accommodation were left with one grim place of last resort. Canvas Town was a tent city, authorised by Governor La Trobe in 1852 as a salve for the housing crisis, located on the south side of the Yarra River at Emerald Hill (now the site of the Melbourne Arts Centre). Like the township of Melbourne itself, Canvas Town was laid out in an orderly grid. Interspersed with tent dwellings were tent stores, bakers shops, butchers stalls, restaurants, sly grog shops and barbers shops. Inhabitants paid five shillings for a plot.
It sounds like a fine solution, but the way of life for its eight thousand inhabitants was anything but idyllic. The MARCO POLO CHRONICLE had warned immigrants about Canvas Town, the epitome of misery and costliness. The land here was unforgiving: boggy in winter, baked dry in summer. The only available water supply was the foetid Yarra River, downstream of the tanneries and soap factories of Collingwood and Richmond. Colonial fever, dysentery and crime were rife.
Martha Clendinning paid a ghoulish visit to Canvas Town one day, perhaps lured by what Charles Dickens called the ‘attraction of repulsion’. The begrimed and unrecognisable children who roamed about in packs, dodging and weaving carts that were loaded with firewood, rumbling between the tents with their wretched occupants, horrified Martha. Everyone and everything was covered in dust. Henry Mundy provided the soundtrack: children squalling, women shrieking and men shouting, the noise was uproarious.
There may have been mud, filth, flies, teeming accommodation, gaudy dresses, drunken revellers, exorbitant prices, ominous diseases and absent husbands, but we should not confuse this bedlam with Hollywood’s version of the Wild West. There is a significant difference. Melbourne was a far-flung but loyal satellite of the British Empire, built by and upon British institutions. By 1854, Melbourne already had a public library and a university. Within thirty years, it would become an exemplary international metropolis. And in the imperial metropolis, unlike Dodge City, one expected to be governed—and governed judiciously.
On the American frontier, Judge Lynch was the only paternal figure, and Darwinian logic—the survival of the physically and spiritually fittest—was remorseless. During the Californian gold rush, the ideology of order was based on the morality of the individual rather than the institutions established by the ruling elite: individual honour counted for more than an externally imposed social order. By contrast, British citizens expected to be governed by the organisations and ethos of British justice. As the MARCO POLO CHRONICLE reassured its readers, the Genuine Spirit of British Generosity, Nobility and Earnestness exists in the brave young city. They would not need to fend for themselves; the mother country had their back.
But prevailing British social mores would be tested. Tent living didn’t only let the dust in. Like a sea voyage, mass camping brought unexpected, and potentially uninvited, familiarity. William Kelly described an indelicate drawback of tent living: if your candle at bedtime happened to be extinguished first, you might probably be startled by the shadowy phantom of Mrs or Miss A B C, next door, in her night-dress, preparing for the stretcher. There’s a certain ribald piquancy to Kelly’s sketch, but the fact is that camping life, like ship life, made for a community of intimate strangers.
Boundaries were as steadfast as the flicker of candlelight. In this, the material conditions of living reflected the metaphysical aspect of social change. One female sojourner wrote that Australian conventions were quite an elastic, compressible thing, and give to the touch like anything. William Westgarth reflected that such flexibility could catch a fellow off guard; over-weening aspiration lurked in the shadows and threatened customary notions of decency. Ambition, he observed, writing about the gold rush population, may rear its head from any social grade, unchecked by conventional barriers. It’s no wonder that colonial anxiety did not turn on how to employ or house the restless throng daily washing up on the colony’s shores, but rather on how to restrain this ‘downside up community’.5
All a lie, thundered Thomas Pierson. He was merely committing to his diary what many people discussed over tea and damper. The crashing discord between expectation and reality quickly became apparent to most immigrants. Just think of those three months or more at sea. It’s a long time to defer gratification. To stare at the horizon with only the wide-open future ahead. All those promises of prosperity—milk and honey and manly self-regard—conjured up at will to crowd out the oceanic stench of vomit, piss, maggots and death. And then, finally, you’re there. Thomas Pierson was not the only new arrival with a gnawing sense that he’d been hoodwinked. And Martha Clendinning was but one of many chroniclers who spoke of their intense anxiety.
Anxiety, as today’s psychiatrists will tell you, can be a symptom of the dissonance between two fundamental states of being: a clash between inner conception and outer manifestation, or between the idealised and the actual. Could we diagnose a mass emotional decompensation among Victoria’s immigrants? Commentators certainly evoked the language of disease to describe the social pathology created by the cascade of gold rushes. The yellow fever, it was called. Melbourne is a dreadful place, wrote Henry Mundy, everybody seems to be going mad either with too much money or too little. The entire colony was infected, according to John Capper: the gold fever raged here more generally and more violently than in New South Wales.
George Evans analysed the root of the malady: poor fellows who went up [to the diggings] with bright hopes and golden dreams are coming down with empty pockets and desponding hearts. George Francis Train was apt to agree, despite the fact that he was well on his way to establishing one of Melbourne’s most successful trading houses. Lying reports. Yes—I repeat, lying reports, Train wrote on 7 November 1853, lying reports that went home from Melbourne and Sydney…reports made to catch the eye of every adventurer. Train believed that the reports were planted by parties interested in land and sales commissions, then echoed by newspapers with an eye to their own profits. After six months in the colony, Train had decided that Victoria was not the Southern El Dorado, but the South Sea Bubble. I know of no instance in commercial history, he railed, when so large a business has been transacted without any reliable information.
Thomas Pierson also thought it was people with interests who trafficked in false hope; he fingered the shipowners—and merchants like G. F. Train.
Not everyone experienced their internal ructions as maddening. Willie Davis Train, a southern belle plucked from the plantation, might have been expecting to find life in the South Sea Bubble arduous. But after a year in Melbourne, she wrote in a long letter to her father, Colonel George Davis, a friend of Abraham Lincoln: The extraordinary change which has been effected in Melbourne within the past year can scarcely be credited by those who have not like myself witnessed the wonderful revolution. For Willie, the external pace of change had swept through her like a tonic, tempering her grief at losing her only child just weeks before sailing. As I advance in years and experience, she wrote to her brother on the same day, I find myself undergoing such a wonderful revolution that at times I marvel at my own thoughts.
An inner riot; a symbiotic uprising of spirit and circumstance. Willie’s only misgiving was the amount of time George spent at work, absorbed in business, building a new stone warehouse or clinching another deal. He was also infamous for occupying a personal chair in gin-slinging at the Criterion Hotel in Collins Street, run by American proprietor Sam Moss. I rarely see him, she confided, but must I suppose make no complaints. Willie would have known she was one of the lucky ones. For the majority of newcomers, even other well-heeled ladies of fine breeding and education, it was a struggle just to keep a toehold in an avalanche of adversity.
For every miner or merchant in the money, there was another down on his luck. And that very often meant a starving wife and children or a shelved fiancée or a fretful mother at home, waiting for news of a distant son’s good fortune. In the case of Janet Kincaid, her husband’s ledger was definitely in deficit. He had been gone for over two years, following the rushes around Victoria, while Janet was left in Glasgow with six children and a slew of unanswered letters. By the time she at last procured her husband’s latest address from his father, she was heartily fed up. A rare archival find, here is Janet in her full glory:
You left to better your family, you don’t need to write that any more, we have had enough of that talk. You had better do something for them. You left the ship to better your self and to get your money to your self. You never earned much for your family, far less for your Wife, you sent five Pounds, two years and a half ago. You mention in a letter to me that you made more money at the digging than ever you made at home. You might have sent us the half of what you made. You are a hard hearted Father when you could sit down and eat up your children’s meat your self. I was a poor unfortunate Wretch, little did I think when I was young what I had to come through with your conduck. We might have been the happiest couple in Greenock, you got a good wife and many a good job at home if you had been inclined to do well but folks that cante do well at home is not to be trusted Abroad…poor Duncan [child number five] does not know what sort of thing a Father is, he thinks it is something for eating…find a proper place where I will send my letters. No more at present from your deserted Wife Janet Kincaid.6
The ghosts of the past haunted new immigrants, reminding them of their righteous strivings and goading them with the too-often inadequate results.
Some single women fared better on arrival than their male counterparts, often because employment situations had been pre-arranged. When nineteen-year-old Irish girl Eliza Darcy arrived on the City of Manchester in July 1854, she went straight into the service of Mr Jeffries, on the Great Western Road, employed on a three-month contract for £18 with rations.7 Eliza was born in Ennis, County Clare, in the parish of Killaloe, the second largest Catholic diocese in Ireland. Another branch of the Darcy family from Clare had arrived on the Parsee in June 1854: Anthony and Honora Darcy and their six children aged between fourteen and twenty-five. Eliza travelled alone to Victoria, but also sailing on the City of Manchester were members of the Howard family from Dublin. Devout Catholics, the Howard and Darcy lines would later unite in the passion-fuelled summer of 1854.
The Galway tearaways, Bridget and Michael Nolan, also secured employment as domestic servants soon after arriving in Geelong penniless, and, according to family tradition, shoeless. Bridget had a malformed arm and worried it would be counted against her, but the siblings found permanent work at a Mt Wallace grazing station without much trouble.
One girl, employed as a servant, twittered merrily to her sisters at home about her startling new prospects on the marriage market:
I had an offer a few days after landing from a gold-digger, with £600–£700. Since that I have had another from a bushman, with £900; he has gone to the diggings again, to make plenty of money. That I have not decided on yet. I shall have a handsome house and garden and all I wish…I have so many chances, a midshipman for one, so you may guess how different things are here if you are respectable.8
Eligible women had a remarkable new power to pick and choose their mate, a fact that caused significant moral panic about the influence of truculent wives. Other single girls could get themselves an instant breadwinner. Eliza Lucus wrote home, When immigrant ships came in, the Diggers came down to meet them, to try and induce women to marry them and go back to the diggings with them.9 Public servant William Westgarth, one of Victoria’s earliest historians, corroborated Eliza’s reminiscences. As soon as an immigrant ship arrived there was a rush to the docks, wrote Westgarth, the wives for servants and the youth for wives. (In Westgarth’s opinion, the latter should always have taken precedence.)
The offer of marriage and a dray ride to the diggings was not every girl’s idea of a good time, yet for many it was just another form of assisted passage. And single women had an alarming degree of autonomy, able to choose between domestic service and marriage. Even more disconcerting for bystanders, these newly empowered young women were choosing to go it alone and determine their own definition of freedom and independence.
But for married women, the insecurity of an unemployed male breadwinner and its accompanying disillusionment could be debilitating. After Jane McCracken and her husband Alex resolved to take up dairying as a means to self-sufficiency, Jane described her state of mind in a letter to her mother and eleven siblings back home in Auchencrosh in Scotland. People give us great encouragement, of what it will do if we persevere, wrote Jane, but beginners in the world like us and everything new to us we likely have more anxiety than there is any use for. As she suspected, the superfluous adrenaline did not serve Jane well, and her letters reveal a woman on the wrong side of a nervous breakdown.10
If uppity, anxious or aggrieved wives weren’t enough to trouble a man, there was always the weather to complain about. Where is the beautiful climate and the delicious fruits that every book on this country which I saw in the States pictured in such enthusiastic colours? asked George Francis Train. The northerly wind, his wife Willie Davis wrote, is more disagreeable than anything you can imagine. After a full year in Victoria, the Calwell brothers had seen both sides of the seasonal coin. Dan bemoaned summer’s unsufferable heat, tormenting flies and whirl-winds of dust, then winter’s Rain, rain, rain! Nothing but rain. Surely, he lamented, this is one of the most unpleasant climates in the world.
What the Calwell boys didn’t know was that, in the middle of one of the driest decades in the century, the winter of 1854 was one of the wettest on record. And that the meteorological crapshoot would make all the difference to the deluge of discontent about to prevail.
It was not just Victoria’s barometric pressure that fluctuated wildly. In 1853, Victoria purchased £480,000 worth of British goods—about the same amount as Spain, and a quarter of what was bought by the sixty million people of the Russian Empire.11 In 1851 Victoria imported £122 worth of American goods. A year later, that figure had reached £60,000, a measure of the sort of rapid expansion in American business interests that had George Francis Train jumping out of his long johns. In 1853, 134 ships arrived in Melbourne from the United States, bringing £1.7 million worth of goods. In 1852, bank deposits increased from £820,000 to £4,330,000.12 No such go-aheadative place exists elsewhere, as Train put it. It was the sheer lunacy of the post-1852 market that persuaded contemporary observer John Capper to remark society is to a certain degree unhinged. Commercial transactions, to his mind, were completely deranged.
But by and large supplies were able to keep up with the exploding demand, and there were only two commodities that Victorians couldn’t get enough of: women and alcohol. By the end of 1854, Melbourne merchant Robert Caldwell wrote that 80,000 wives are wanted—one of the few articles of export which is safe, if sent in good condition and warranted sound. As for grog, the statistics are eloquent. In 1851 Victorians drank £23,000 worth of brandy, £5000 of gin, £15,000 of rum, £3600 of whisky and £20,000 of wine. By 1853, these figures jumped to £630,000, £196,000, £149,000, £42,000 and £353,000 respectively.13 You will notice that this jump in imports represents considerably more than the five-fold hike that would be commensurate with the population increase. (There were those, of course, who believed that the dearth of wives and profusion of alcohol were closely connected.)
But even liquor merchants were not doing as well as property owners. Those who had been in the colony prior to 1851, many of whom were now established professionals and merchants, were able to capitalise on the boom in real estate prices, selling for stupid prices land they had bought for next to nothing. Landlords could and did charge phenomenal rents.
Watching over the swirling eddies of fortune and famine from the heights of political office was the Victorian Government. In 1854 the government consisted of an Executive Council (comprising the lieutenant governor, the colonial secretary, the attorney general, the colonial treasurer and the collector of customs), the Legislative Council (eight members nominated by the governor and thirty-five by voters) and an understorey of clerks.
To exercise the privilege of a vote, a person had to be a British subject, male, over twenty-one and a free colonist. He had to be a freeholder of £100 or a leaseholder of £10 per annum value, or own a licence to depasture, or have occupied a house worth £10 per annum for six months previous. It was the property qualifications that effectively disenfranchised most of the new immigrant population. Wool had been replaced by gold as the most valuable commodity, but pastoralists lost none of their prerogative because of their entrenched position in the political economy of the colony. Even a gung-ho merchant capitalist like Robert Caldwell could see that volatile Victoria was governed by a system where the squatters had more than their fair share of representation, while the diggers have none at all. At present, wrote Caldwell, the diggers had no constitutional way of calling attention to their grievances, real or fancied. This was a big problem.
The trouble was, times had changed. Rapidly. The Victoria that greeted the arrivals of late 1853 and early 1854 was not the same place it had been in 1852 when people like Bonwick, Capper and Mossman were writing their breathless guidebooks and advice manuals. The sluggish communications of the mid-nineteenth century misrepresented the pace of change on the ground. It could take up to a year for a resident of Ballarat to send a letter home, receive a reply and write back again. In such time, several new rushes would have occurred, one town depleted of its fickle population while another tent city had mushroomed elsewhere. In such time, tens of thousands of new immigrants would be disgorged onto Melbourne’s streets, all competing for the same small stock of housing, the same shallow pool of jobs, the same desire to kit themselves out and get on the road to the diggings.
What made this situation more ominous was the fact that the quantity of gold unearthed peaked in 1852. In that year the value of gold exported from Victoria was £14,866,799. In 1853 this sum fell to £11,588,782 and by 1854 the plummet continued, to £8,770,796. At the same time, the population of the goldfields had swiftly increased, from approximately 35,000 in 1852 to 73,000 in 1853 and 93,000 in 1854. This meant that there was much less gold to go around: from £425 worth per person per annum in 1852, it had dropped to only £87 worth by 1854 This change, wrote William Kelly in 1860, produced a modified panic.14 Despite all the grandiosity, the simple fact was that by 1854, Melbourne was sliding into economic chaos. A glut of cheap imports meant there was no incentive for local manufacturing. An itinerant labour force moving between unemployment in the city and gruelling work for little reward on the diggings made for a fragmented population of disaffected migrants.
Governor La Trobe, who had resigned his commission in December 1852 but had to wait an agonising seventeen months for his replacement to arrive, was aware that he was in way over his head. Yet by mid-1853, the Executive Council had embarked on a spending spree of its own. In 1851 government expenditure on post offices, for example, was £11,165. In 1854, it was over £120,000. In 1851, spending on public works amounted to £32,600. By 1854 it was over £1.4 million. In 1851 policing received £24,000 and education £6000. In 1854 these services received £650,000 and £160,000 respectively.15 A triumvirate of urban landowners, rural pastoralists and an unrepresentative administrative clique ruled Victoria. Buoyed by the land boom, the government borrowed freely.
It also taxed liberally. By the time Sir Charles Hotham arrived in June 1854, he would inherit not only a government deep in debt but also a populace chafing, as the centralised model of colonial government inherited from New South Wales ground up against a worldly populace expecting self-sufficiency and independence. As William Westgarth observed, the Victoria that welcomed the renegade Bridget Nolan, the adventurous Eliza Darcy, the go-getting Sarah Hanmer, the infatuated Margaret Howden and the devout Anastasia Hayes was occupied by a promiscuous multitude: young, restless, indignant, over-invested, underfed—and smelling a rat.
Frances Pierson set out on the road to Ballarat on the first day of summer 1853 with her husband Thomas and son Mason. She had not travelled across the briny deep from her Pennsylvania home to be a grass widow in some flyblown Melbourne lodging house. Besides, she’d tried that once already. Back in April 1853, Thomas and Mason had ventured up to Bendigo to open a shop, and when that swiftly failed they went prospecting at the McIvor diggings. Left alone, Frances twiddled her thumbs for a moment or two, then applied for work at a stationer’s business. She reasoned that if they would employ her to help tend store she would rather be there than sitting in the Boarding House. Frances was also earning a much-needed income, a fact upon which Thomas was reluctant to dwell. Less than two months later, the Pierson menfolk were back. Bendigo was purgatory, proclaimed Thomas, its population rife with disorder and antipathy towards the authorities. In June 1853, an anti-licence association was formed and a giant petition got up, decrying several aspects of the goldfields administration. Thousands of miners were wearing red ribbons as a symbol of unity and defiance.
By 1 September 1853, news of fresh gold strikes at Ballarat—110 feet deep, tens of thousand of pounds worth of gold per hole—came whistling down the wire. These spectacular finds were dubbed the ‘Jewellers’ Shops’, so seemingly effortless was it to reach into the earth and pull out a fortune. The ensuing rush saw thousands of people suddenly throw in their jobs and head straight to Ballarat in the spring of 1853. Sparkling new evidence of Ballarat’s untapped potential prompted a resurgence in intra-colonial travel to the diggings, as people ventured from South Australia and Tasmania to try their hand. George and Charles Evans left Melbourne on 11 November 1853, with John Basson Humffray in their travelling party. After an unsuccessful stint at mining on the Ovens goldfields, Charles Evans had decided that auctioneering, not digging, would be the key to future prosperity. J. B. Humffray was making his first trip to the goldfields—with no inkling, surely, that exactly a year from that date he would be at the forefront of a campaign for justice that would make the Bendigo Red Ribbon movement look like a fancy-dress party.
As for the Piersons, they too decided to go into commerce rather than industry. They planned to open a store at Ballarat, unperturbed by Thomas’s recent failure at Bendigo. Frances carefully packed her camera and photographic apparatus. A daguerreotypist from Liverpool whom she had met in Melbourne assured her that her equipment was of impressive quality. And there would surely be a host of lucky diggers eager to commemorate their pristine nuggets. Frances has some idea of her and the [Liverpudlian] Gent commencing the business, Thomas wrote, with a hint of condescension, in his diary as they prepared to depart. What would the Worshipful Master back home at the Philadelphia Olive Lodge have thought of the idea? But Victoria was not Pennsylvania and Frances knew it.
The Piersons arrived in Ballarat on 6 December 1853. They were greeted by twenty thousand other hopeful supplicants at the altar of rampant ambition.
The road to Ballarat stretched west from Melbourne, through the outlying suburb of Flemington and on to the wide plains of Keilor and Melton. It’s the same route that you would take today, without the tangle of ring roads, truck depots and tilt-slab factories. The modern-day industrial heartland takes advantage of the same topography that departing diggers appreciated: flat, open terrain, a carpet of basalt rolled out by ancient lava flows from the South Australian border to Port Phillip Bay. William Westgarth described these plains as an ocean of grass. Charles Evans saw it the same way: stretching as far as the eye could reach were immense grassy plains undulating in emerald folds like the swell of the ocean. It was fertile ground above as well as beneath: open hunting lands that had sustained the region’s Indigenous inhabitants for tens of thousands of years.
The seventy-mile road to Ballarat—a well-worn track, really—marked the ragged course for a chaotic rush of fortune-seekers. Carts, drays, coaches and thousands of pairs of galloping hooves and plodding feet carried people and goods to the magnetic epicentre of Victoria’s goldfields. The fact is, wrote one man in a letter home to Scotland in February 1852, everybody, old and young, rich and poor, learned and illiterate are off to the diggings. James Bonwick noted that the allure was physically impossible to ignore. The Gold Fields have a most bewitching influence, he wrote after his own visit to Ballarat in 1852, the very name begets a spasmodic affection of the limbs, which want to be off.16 The road to Ballarat was akin to William Blake’s ‘crooked road of prophecy’, a road washed smooth by the salvation that lay at the end.17
Thirty miles from Melbourne, in the low, fertile basin of Bacchus Marsh, travellers were forced to navigate a deep cut-out known as The Gap. This jagged landmark provided a lucrative winter industry for bullock drivers, who charged a king’s ransom to haul out drays piled high with gear from the swollen river at the base of the gorge. Some mud-drenched parties were held up for days waiting to be dragged up the slippery face of the cut-out. (Today, cars whiz along this ravine on a nifty roller-coaster stretch of the Western Highway.) Back on flat land, the road snaked through a thick stringybark forest to Ballan and from there followed a gentle incline towards the only sizable peak on the landscape, Mt Buninyong, rising to the left. Once reaching that acme of achievement, you were almost there. A solitary messenger on horseback could make the journey in a day of furious riding. An average cart trip took three days (and cost £25 in dry weather—a princely sum). On foot, it was a week-long hike.
There are innumerable accounts of the epic journey to Ballarat. In most of them, after the muck, dust and overcrowding of Melbourne, the open road is a revelation. Twenty-two-year-old Emily Skinner, who travelled to the Ovens diggings in 1854, was immediately won over by the beauty and healthiness of the country. Mary Bristow was rendered speechless. I cannot describe the bush, she wrote. It means such an extent of country covered with trees, some large, some small, no sign of human habitation except here and there a few camps or tents, some inhabited by blacks. She found the scenery beautiful and the blacks exquisitely made. To her astonishment, Mary felt that the Australian bush was the incarnation of Eden. Mrs Mannington Caffyn, in her contribution to the compendium COO-EE: TALES OF AUSTRALIAN LIFE BY AUSTRALIAN LADIES, was also rhapsodic but observed a sting in the tail of Paradise. Australian sunlight, she wrote, is quite original, and only flourishes in Australia. It is young and rampant and bumptious, and it is rather cruel, with the cruelty of young untried things. Many women who travelled the roads in summer reported sitting out the midday sun under a stand of trees, taking their lead from the old hands, not to mention the cows and sheep.18
As early as March 1853, contemporary observers like James Bonwick were already commenting on the incontrovertible fact of the women: the diggings were attracting them like ants to honey. Bonwick wrote in his AUSTRALIAN GOLD DIGGER’S MONTHLY MAGAZINE that in just two days he counted one hundred and twenty ladies, going up either with or to their lords of the pick and cradle. Bonwick called it a phenomenon, this feminine Exodus from our townships. He also noted that some husbands have taken uncommon care to prepare for the coming of their better halves by forsaking their tents for log cabins with stone chimneys, floor coverings and even an iron bedstead.19
Some diggers were not so much tearaways as nest-featherers. Their wives accompanied them to keep families intact that would otherwise have fractured, but also in a genuine spirit of exploration. When James Watson determined to go to Ballarat, his wife Margaret, who had already survived several trials with James and their children, decided that this was one more adventure for her.20 Emily Skinner knew that her husband William would not go if I objected very much, etc. but, she reasoned, what a much better chance we should have of getting on [together]. After thinking and talking it over a little, the couple determined that William would precede Emily, make enough money to build a comfortable tent home, then send for Emily to join him. This plan was realised surprisingly quickly.
There were hundreds of single women, too, on the road to Ballarat, some joining (or searching for) absent husbands or connecting with kin or kith from their old lives, others forging their own distinct paths in the world. Eliza Darcy, who left the employ of Mr Jeffries in October 1854, was one of them. Having seen out her pre-arranged contract, Eliza headed to Ballarat, where numerous members of her extended family had gathered. Anthony and Honora Darcy and their five children, probably Eliza’s cousins, had recently arrived on the Parsee. Also sailing on the Parsee were six Dunne children, aged seventeen to twenty-three, and their mother Mary, Eliza’s aunt. Other Dunnes had travelled on the City of Manchester with Eliza, as had several members of the Howard family. By the explosive spring of 1854, all these Darcys, Howards and Dunnes would be in Ballarat. By August 1855, Eliza would be married to Patrick Howard, a close friend of an Irish engineer named Peter Lalor who was engaged to her cousin, Geelong school teacher Alicia Dunne.
Bridget Nolan was also on the road to Ballarat. Life at the Mt Wallace station had been exciting for the Nolan siblings, with a visit from bushrangers and an old black woman coming to stay, but after eighteen months the call of the diggings could no longer be dismissed. Possibly Bridget had got word that her shipmate Patrick Hynes was in Ballarat and a reunion beckoned. Now that they had shoes, Bridget and her brother Michael walked the ten kilometres from Mt Wallace to Ballarat. She and Patrick Hynes would be married in the spring of 1854.
There is no account of how Clara Du Val or Sarah Hanmer, both single mothers of young children, made their way to Ballarat. Unlike Eliza Darcy, neither of the actresses appeared to have a network of family and friends to support them. But there were many women making the journey on their own. Emily Skinner met two stout young women on her journey to the Ovens. They told me that they had many offers of a place [in Melbourne], as it was hard to get servants, wrote Emily in her diary, but the girls were determined to go to the diggings, where high wages and easy times awaited them. Such was the unruly confidence of the times.
Forty-two-year-old spinster Mary Bristow was keen to go to the diggings as a kind of bivouac, and found three young women to accompany her. The party set off on foot almost immediately. The first night the women slept in a covered dray, but it rained in torrents. I don’t think I closed my eyes, wrote Mary. In the morning, the women walked to a nearby brook and completed our toilets. Mary was relieved to note that there is always due observance of respect from the men in their travelling company. The first day, they walked fourteen miles, the next twenty-four miles. The women wore veils and large bonnets against the summer sun. They never ventured out in the middle of the day; it was too dangerous to expose [ourselves] to the sun’s burning rays. But if the sun was hazardous, Mary found that the people of the road were not. All strangers or travellers receive a welcome in this hospitable land, she recorded: ladies could walk or ride long distances unattended and have nothing to fear. I have never been so happy or free from care, she wrote, calling to mind a line of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s about ‘the independence of solitude’. It was on a Victorian bush track that Mary Bristow discovered the sweetness of her own company and freedom from the crowded concerns of others. How curious that Emerson, the American champion of individualism, provided the guiding light for a woman forging a path to the Victorian gold diggings, the fabled home of radical collectivism.
Mrs Elizabeth Massey also found a change in herself on the road to Ballarat. She was not so much pulled by the allure of gold as pushed by the weight of duty. Back in England Mrs Massey had been married only a few weeks when her new husband unexpectedly called on her to accompany him to Australia. Disgust, she wrote in her memoir eight years later, indeed is not a word strong enough to express my feelings at the moment, particularly as I had to wear a calm face and not distress my loving friends by any ebullition of feeling. Mrs Massey considered her journey banishment in place of a honeymoon. On arrival in Victoria, the Masseys went straight to the diggings to avoid the filth, flies and expense of Melbourne. It was on the road that Mrs Massey’s expulsion began to take on a more optimistic quality. On the road, she found that people were more warm-hearted and hospitable than at home in England, more compassionate and forgiving. Her theory? They themselves [have] passed through the fiery ordeal of expatriation and suspense. A haphazard community of wanderers, a band of gypsies, no longer contained by a ship’s hold or a social milieu of formality and diffidence.
Indeed, sudden outbursts of feeling, the likes of which Mrs Massey could not afford to affect at home, seemed the very order of the day in impulsive Victoria. Bonwick described this fashion for spontaneity in the February 1853 edition of his GOLD DIGGER’S MONTHLY MAGAZINE, a widely distributed publication that Mrs Massey may have consulted.
Our gold fields, as a grand focus of moral magnetism, have drawn together a heterogenous multitude of all classes, climes and character. The ardent and impetuous form the vast majority…strong appeals are made to the sordid and animal passions of humanity.
Such unharnessed emotion would later fuel a tragedy, but for now Mrs Massey felt joyfully off the leash. What had initially settled upon her as a black cloud of submissive misery now seemed like a party of pleasure. True to her creed of feminine adaptation, Mrs Massey marvelled at the sights along the road: the gigantic fallen gums, the sweet-scented wattles and correas, a fairyland of magnificent new flowers to behold. She and other (unidentified) female travelling companions camped for the night in the Black Forest, sleeping under the cart with their cloaks used to make a barricade against a looming storm. Mrs Massey revelled in the sweet harmony of nature. Every new thunderclap or lightning strike sent waves of electricity down her straitlaced back. All is romance in this most romantic land, she sighed.
Some women initially believed, like Elizabeth Massey, they were on the road to perdition but happily discovered they were actually on a path to unexpected release. Others yearned to be let loose and saw a journey to the goldfields as a credible flight path. Historians have long commented on the escape fantasies that, more than simple gold lust, stimulated men’s rush to the diggings.…[in] the days when men broke their bonds and dreamed of marvellous things to come. It’s always been at least implicit—sometimes aggressively obvious—that among the bonds from which men longed to be free were the harping women with their insufferable demands and bawling brats. There is no doubt that some men did see the goldfields as their ticket out of a domestic rut. Square this fact with all the late-nineteenth-century jingoism about frontier independence, and we have deadbeats like Janet Kincaid’s husband reincarnated as national heroes.
But it’s clear that many women also harboured their own aspirations of escape, not necessarily from spouses and children, but from the tedious and restrictive rituals of the feminine daily round. In particular, many educated and refined women (in the words of one emigrant who eloped with her brother’s tutor and emigrated to Victoria) thought the ease of their English life well left behind them. High teas and calling cards were a subtle form of foot binding for many nineteenth-century British gentlewomen. The price of material comfort was conformity: it cost a lot of effort and anxiety to keep up appearances. Years later, Mrs Massey, who spent two years on the diggings between 1852 and 1854, would write I look back with a grateful heart to my gipsy life. But of course it is the women who disappeared into the slipstream of the nomads—the ones who didn’t record their thoughts or movements for a reading audience—who truly abandoned genteel performance and enjoyed the colonial gift of insignificance.
Refugees from convention were joined on the road by fugitives from the law. The goldfields frontier offered rabbit warrens of protection for women who needed a fresh start. The predominance of ex-convicts from Van Diemen’s Land on the goldfields became a political issue after 1853, but local currency lasses could also find themselves in trouble. Chief among such miscreants were ‘fallen women’, those who had drawn the short straw in the lottery of premarital sex. A Miss Smith, with her fatherless baby, could be reincarnated on the diggings as Mrs Smith, an apocryphal widow who’d lost her husband in a mining accident or maritime mishap.
For it was no joke to be ‘caught out’. Reports of young women who killed or abandoned their newborns in an attempt to hide the evidence of sin are common. On 31 October 1854, for example, the colonial secretary was informed that a one-month-old child had been found in the grounds of St John’s School on the corner of Elizabeth and La Trobe streets in Melbourne. The babe, who was in good health, was wearing a long white frock, white cap and white flannel hood and was wrapped in a blue and green checked shawl. The GOVERNMENT GAZETTE posted a reward for the apprehension of the mother.
The POLICE GAZETTE was also replete with reports of female runaways. On 27 February 1854, information was distributed about one Sarah Wilson, who had left the hired service of Mr Smith in Collingwood before the expiry of her contract. Wilson was nineteen years old, slightly under five foot, with a dark complexion and small, regular features. She has left her clothes behind her and has no relatives in Melbourne, noted the GAZETTE. In March 1854, Ann Plummer escaped from the residence of her husband in Fitzroy Crescent. Ann had been tried for an undisclosed offence at the Central Criminal Court in 1849 and given a fifteen-year sentence, to be served at the premises of her husband. Ann was described as aged twenty-five years, a fancy-box maker, five foot one inch tall, with a fresh complexion, brown hair, blue eyes, native Burnley, nose has been smashed.21 Women had many pragmatic reasons to seek the anarchic embrace of the goldfields.
For Catherine Sherwin, Ballarat would be the place to build a dynasty from ignominious beginnings. Literate and ambitious, Catherine and her sister Mary had sailed to Australia as free immigrants in 1850. At five foot one, of slight build with a dark complexion, black hair and grey eyes, Catherine would have had some capital in the colonial marriage market. If the Sherwins followed typical patterns of Irish family chain migration, it’s possible that Catherine’s elder brothers came to Victoria first, followed by the unmarried sisters and finally the parents, with younger siblings in tow. There were certainly other Sherwins residing in Victoria, with whom Catherine later regrouped when her life course was derailed.
Like other Irish immigrant girls of the Famine generation, Catherine and Mary married soon after their arrival in the colony. Catherine was witness at Mary’s wedding to Everard Gadd at the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Melbourne in April 1852. Five months later, Catherine exchanged her vows with James Francis Bentley at St Peter’s Anglican Church. James was a thirty-four-year-old native of Surrey, England, running a confectionery business in Elizabeth Street, North Melbourne. Thirteen years her elder, James had experienced far more of colonial life than his young bride, not least because he had been transported to Norfolk Island on a ten-year sentence in 1844.
Of average height and stoutly built, with dark hair, a fair complexion, a mole on the back of his neck and a slight limp caused by a mutilated right foot, James nonetheless caught Catherine’s eye. According to family oral history, the couple married for love.22 In 1852, newly wedded to a merchant with good connections in Melbourne society—and pregnant within a few months of her marriage—Catherine’s colonial star was only rising. Her first son, Francis Henry Bentley, known throughout his life as Thomas, was born in September 1853 in his parents’ shop. Shortly after her confinement, Catherine and her young family were on the road.
The summer of 1853 brought the predictable fusion of heat, dust and savage episodes of scorching wind. Flies crawled through meat carcasses and into wet, sticky human orifices. Colonial typhus menaced the goldfields populace, just as it did Melbourne’s, with its low fever and high mortality rate. Dysentery was another quiet killer, especially of babies. Rumblings of discontent vibrated beneath the seemingly solid foundations of a tent city built on gold. Christmas was almost here, bringing its celebration of birth, its hope for renewal and its inevitable focus on those who were not invited into the stable.
For the imminent Yuletide revelry, Frances Pierson decided to combat homesickness with generosity. Frances is well and stands it here first rate, wrote Thomas, with a touch of incredulity that his wife had managed to make such a smooth transition to a suntan in December. She had recently purchased a Yankee cooking stove from Melbourne for £8 plus £3 cartage, benefiting from the economical summer transport costs. She baked a load of apple pies, cranberry tarts and sweet cakes. Enough for her small family to enjoy, and to share with some of the many single diggers who would be celebrating the festive season devoid of mothers, sisters and home comforts. Perhaps she would even sell some of her precious wares. Lord knew they could use the extra shillings.
On Christmas Day 1853, Thomas Pierson cast a glance at his robust wife, stoking the campfire, and his teenage son, skylarking with a crew of new mates. Surprised by his own high spirits, he wrote in his diary: Well here we are on the Ballarat diggings. The question naturally occurs: where will we all be the next Christmas of ’54?