Martha Clendinning was a woman who knew her own noddle. Like Frances Pierson, she was not content to remain in Melbourne while her husband went to the diggings. When Dr George Clendinning announced his imminent departure to Ballarat in the autumn of 1853, Martha declared her intention to accompany him. She was thirty-one years old; George was sixteen years her senior, but Martha would not be cowed. I had made up my mind, she declared. She would go to Ballarat, and so would her five-year-old daughter, Margaret, and Martha’s younger sister, Sarah Lloyd, despite Sarah’s husband’s objection that there were no decent women there, only a few of the Vandies’ wives. Tom Lloyd repeated the judgment of men throughout the ages when they didn’t want to share their self-proclaimed territory. The goldfields were no fit place for any respectable woman.
The husbands went to scout the fields for the most promising tent site, and Martha and Sarah got to talking. After they had left us women, wrote Martha in her reminiscences, we had discussed our future life at the diggings and we at once came to the conclusion that we never could sit down in our tents there with our hands before us. Martha was pragmatic. Our house work (if I may use the term) would take up very little time, and there was but one child between us to attend to. Martha was also shrewd. Besides finding something to occupy our time, we felt we should much like some way of making a little money to help our husbands in their hard work. The Doctor, as Martha called her husband, was intending to dig for gold, not to practise medicine. Since few people got rich overnight, he might need some help at first, even if he would not countenance the idea now. And after all, at forty-seven he was not a young man. But what could two well-bred Anglo-Irish girls, scions of the Protestant Ascendancy, do to earn a livelihood? Teaching and needle-work, the usual womanly employments, were out of the question; they were not needed on the gold fields, mused Martha. At last the happy thought struck us. We would keep a store! A nice, tidy, little store! We were well pleased with the idea.
Martha and Sarah conveyed their joyous plan to their husbands. The men greeted the proposal with peals of laughter. They’d be the laughing stock of the diggers, they said. What did a couple of women know of business, they said. You’ll be cheated and mocked, they said. So Martha and Sarah said tosh! We were disgusted at the reception, remembered Martha years later. The sisters kept to their plan, even amid the derision of their husbands, who maintained a quiet sense of our excessive folly. What George did not realise was that moonlighting to support their husbands was commonplace among Ballarat wives. Being financially dependent on his wife was just one more way in which The Doctor was about to become an ordinary digger.
By January 1854, the Ballarat goldfields rattled with industry and hummed with domesticity. The public and private spheres—whose separation was such a Victorian-era ideal—were as permeable here as a candlelit tent. Summer was in full flight, taking its toll on a community that lived in, by and for the elements. A tremendous blow of hot wind blew down to pieces a great many tents, wrote Thomas Pierson on 5 January. Living in those flailing tents were 6650 women, 2150 children and 10,700 men—almost twenty thousand inhabitants. Though Castlemaine and Sandhurst (Bendigo) maintained greater populations in the summer of 1853 (21,225 and 26,500 respectively), Ballarat had the highest proportion of women: forty-five per cent of Ballarat’s inhabitants were women and children, compared with twenty-three per cent at Castlemaine and thirty-one per cent at Bendigo. Even these latter percentages are a far cry from William Withers’ depiction of the womanless crowds of the first year of the gold rush. Of the overall goldfields population of 80,000 in January 1854, one in every three people was a woman or child.1 In Ballarat in 1854, gold digging was inextricable from breadwinning.
Newcomers to the diggings knew to expect that women and children would be there in numbers. You only had to open your eyes. The Ballarat correspondent to the GEELONG ADVERTISER wrote on 25 July 1854 of the romance of the old days when the only amusement to be derived was from gazing at tall stringy-barks. Now, he wrote, it refreshes one to look back on a time when the black police kept watch and ward over adventurous ladies who had come to see the diggings, and whose arrival on the old Golden Point was greeted with a three times three. These days, he sighed, the coach brings up its hundreds of the fair sex, and not a solitary cheer greets its arrival.
One fellow wrote home in late 1853 that there are not less than 20,000 men gold digging, besides women and children, all of whom two months ago were in Melbourne or Geelong. The correspondent’s next comment was probably more fanciful than observational. The diggers are clothing their wives and children in silks and satins, he wrote.2 The image of heroic husbandry, as we have seen, was a central symbol in the gold rush iconography. Chivalrous benefactors were supposed to be the saviours of the day.
But when William Howitt visited the goldfields in 1854, the damsels did not appear to be distressed. There are some hugely fat women on the diggings, he wrote, the life seems to suit them. They seemed to enjoy the outdoor existence, adapting to its conditions. The women were not swathed in finery, but rather dressed in a fashion that suited a life of toil. A wide awake hat, neat fitting jacket, handsome dress, observed Howitt; a costume quite made for the diggings. It needed to be. In the mornings, Howitt saw women and girls hanging out the wash, cooking over campfires and chopping wood with great axes which swung them. They kept chickens and goats. These diggeresses, he concluded, provided a certain stationary substratum beneath the fluctuating surface. Women had quietly become the bedrock of the Victorian mining communities.
Englishman William Kelly, who had previously written books about the Californian goldfields before touring Australia in 1853 and 1858, noted that a remarkable feature of the Ballarat diggings was the large proportion of women. American research reveals that only three per cent to ten per cent of the ‘forty-niners’ were female, clearly a much smaller proportion than in Victoria.3 (In California women’s presence on the goldfields was greeted with hostility by men, who believed that women foretold an end to male camaraderie. There was a common axiom: when the women and Jews arrived, it spelled the end of the good old days.4) If the Californian diggings weren’t an exclusively masculine terrain, men were certainly a more predominant force than in Victoria, and this would have important implications for the respective political destinies of the two frontier outposts.
Kelly noted the upside of this female presence in Ballarat. The Californian digger had to roast, grind and boil his own coffee, he wrote, but the Victorian, who is surrounded with women, would be saved all that bother. It’s tempting to leave the quote there but the rest of the passage reveals his true opinion:
I was on the point of writing the softer sex, but that would have been a misnomer for the most callous specimens of the female creation I ever encountered were mere green pulp in comparison with some of the granite-grained viragoes I had the honour of meeting in the ‘field of cloth of gold’ in the new world.
Kelly preferred the dewy maidens of the old country, with their acquiescent airs and compliant graces; his expectations of what women’s presence on the fields should mean were constantly dashed. Other observers also felt compelled to mention that the average diggeress did not long retain the aspect of an English rose. Howitt commented that lovely, blooming maidens soon withered under the influence of the Australian climate. Their physical elasticity was impaired and they became lamentably susceptible to the encroachments of agedness. (Kelly recommended that men marry greatly below their age, which was common enough without his counsel.) As the bounds of their physical and interpersonal worlds stretched, as they mapped new social and economic terrain, so women’s skin wizened like winter apples. If their shipboard sunburn had signalled a radical inversion for female immigrants—the exchange of safety and seclusion for earthly experience—the terms of the deal were written on their bodies. It was a trade-off that many women were pleased to make.
Right from the start, the idea that the goldfields would be worked by honest British yeomen and their cream-skinned wives was seared into the public imagination. James Bonwick was the ideologue-in-chief with his AUSTRALIAN GOLD DIGGER’S MONTHLY MAGAZINE AND COLONIAL FAMILY VISITOR, first published in October 1852. This little magazine will be the connecting link between the goldfields and the cottage home, Bonwick wrote in the inaugural edition. In stark contrast to the Californian diggings, which had no laws in place, no police force and no regulatory institutions (since California did not become a state of the Union until September 1850, after the Mexican-American war), Victoria was British to its bootstraps. This golden region shall be a peaceful home for the gathering of nations, promised Bonwick. Not the manifest destiny of mighty rivers and endless fertile plains, but the humble provision of an orderly abode.
The Bonwicks of the age were in no doubt about the importance of women in creating the micro households that would agglomerate to the macro colonial domicile. No persons are so interested in the order and security of the diggings as the wives of diggers up there, wrote Bonwick in February 1853. The prevailing notion of women as civilising agents—tamers of men’s wilder passions, harbingers of righteous integrity, John Ruskin’s famed ‘angels of the hearth’—underpinned the acceptance, and indeed encouragement, of women on the diggings. According to this ideal, women would be agents of conservative restoration, reinstating the social mores, and helping to establish the social institutions, of a settled colonial outpost. These ministering angels of the imperial heath would sweep aside the detritus of frontier living, housetraining men in wholesome marriages, bearing children to send to nascent schools: holding up a moral universe in which charity and benevolence would smooth the jagged edges of greed and corruption. That was the idea, anyway.
But it was not just ideology that wove women into the fabric of goldfields society. In the hard-nosed way of British bureaucracy, there were structural provisions made for the reality that women would be integral to the colonial economy. The emblem of the Victorian domestic idyll could be not just a soother of furrowed brows, but a source of revenue too. From the first proclamation of the Gold Regulations for Victoria’s auriferous regions in September 1851, women acquired a unique legal identity. They were able, indeed compelled, to take out a licence to work on the diggings. As such, women were technically afforded the political legitimacy that is the inalienable right of the property owner in a capitalist regime.
This is how the Gold Regulations worked. The administrative model adopted by La Trobe’s government asserted the prerogative of the Crown over all minerals extracted from Crown land. A licence fee of 30 shillings per month was instituted, entitling individual miners to a claim of twelve feet by twelve and the right to take wood and water from the land. Commissioners were appointed to collect the fee, check licences and resolve disputes arising from mining claims.
From the very beginning the licence system was unpopular and unmanageable. With a few exceptions (for ministers of religion, pastoral lease holders, servants) it amounted to a capitation tax; in effect, every person resident on the diggings was required to pay the fee regardless of their success in finding gold. The licence fee was a poll tax, not an income tax—and it was as detested as any poll tax has ever been in the history of the Exchequer.
Because so many of the heads to be taxed rested on the shoulders of women and children, an exemption clause was written into the regulations. The Gold Regulations stated that All females not mining or trading and children under fourteen years of age who shall only reside but not mine any Gold Field did not need to carry a licence nor apply to the commissioners for an ‘exception ticket’. By implication, women who did mine or trade would need to take out their own licence in their own name. It is impossible to ascertain exactly how many women were issued with mining licences, for the gold commissioners’ licensing registers no longer exist. The nineteenth-century laws of coverture would normally have meant that a woman’s legal identity was literally cloaked by her husband’s, but colonial exigencies required the government to take a flexible approach. The only miners and traders on the goldfields who do appear to have been genuinely exempt from licence holding were the Wathaurung.
In principle, then, anyone could access the mineral resource—even women and children—for a flat fee. This levelling approach had an important consequence: broadening the tax base increased the number of people with a stake in Victoria’s fundamentally undemocratic and centralised system of government. Even female licence holders expected a modicum of representation for their taxation—as dramatic events would later demonstrate.
It wasn’t just digging up the Crown’s glittering soil that attracted a fee. All persons resident upon the goldfields in the practice of a profession, trade or calling, of any permitted kind were required to contribute to the public purse. Storekeepers were charged the weighty fee of £15 for a three-month licence to run their business. This charge was just as unpopular as the mining fee, for there was no infrastructure provided in exchange for the revenue, simply the right of occupation, and most stores in 1854 amounted to little more than a family tent with two chambers: one for sleeping in and one for trading out of. When Martha Clendinning purchased a licence for her store, she complained that she had to pay a standard £40 a year quite irrespective of its size and business capacity. My little one was rated the same as the largest in the Main Road. Just as petitions and demonstrations were mounted against the hated licence tax from 1852 onwards, so storekeepers rallied against the iniquitous conditions of their legal tenure. Hawkers, it was pointed out, did not require a licence; the fact that most itinerant salesmen were Jews did not help. For its part, the government refused to acknowledge that the licence fee for mining or storekeeping was a tax at all, arguing that the amount of advantage to be drawn from the privilege of occupying Crown land amply compensated for the loss.5
Bringing miners, shopkeepers and other professionals under the same regulatory rubric produced an interesting result. All goldfields inhabitants were effectively defined as small business people, creating a single category of commercial identity. This one-size-fits-all system would contribute to the famous egalitarianism of the goldfields where, as the balladeer Charles Thatcher sang to packed crowds in the theatres of Ballarat and Bendigo, we’re all upon a level. And because women became central to the economy of the goldfields, so they became integrally entwined in the culture of complaint and the politics of dissent that grew in intensity like a summer storm over the tumultuous months of 1854.
Picking, panning, puddling and cradling required deep reserves of patience in this era of the small-claim system. Minuscule daily rewards only ever amounted to appreciable results after a long haul, if at all. But for that very reason, the process exerted a peculiar hold on the miner. One described the compulsive condition of sinking a hole like this: not knowing what it would be like when we saw it, but fully expecting it every moment.6 This condition of never knowing but always expecting provided the primal force of gold mining’s attraction. It is what historian Chris McConville has dubbed the ‘Existential Now’.7
As with the poker machines of today’s casinos, every push of the button—every thrust of the shovel, thwack of the pick, every flash in the pan—could mean a new destiny, right there and then. Over her five-year career as a gold diggeress, Mary Ann Tyler developed her own explanation of the existential rapture of mining.
You work from day to day with anticipation, and soon the years pass…You can work for very little, and all at once you drop across a fortune. That is why it is so enchanting. You live in expectation…my very soul was lit with delight that I should one day discover more gold.8
European women’s role in Australia’s gold mining history goes back to its very beginnings. Edward Hammond Hargraves is the man credited with the first discovery of gold at Bathurst, New South Wales, in February 1851. Tired of the cares and troubles of [married] life, Hargraves had gone to California in 1849. He returned to the Turon Valley and noticed the topographical similarities between the two regions. He decided to go prospecting, on the sly, to test his hunch that there was gold in them thar hills. He went to see Mrs Lister, the publican at the Guyong Inn, a widow who had seen better days. Hargraves needed a friend. It occurred to me that I could not prosecute my plans efficiently without assistance, he later wrote, and that Mrs Lister was a person in whom I could safely confide. Mrs Lister trusted him too. She furnished Hargraves with a guide—a black fellow—to penetrate the dense region of forest and lent him her eighteen-year-old son as a companion. Most men had laughed at Hargraves’ notions, but she entered with a woman’s heartiness into my views. In his 1855 memoir, Hargraves fully acknowledged that he had Mrs Lister’s generosity of spirit to thank for his subsequent fame. Hargraves also noted that Mrs Cruikshank, the wife of a squatter on the Turon, was the second person to pan with him (after Mrs Lister’s son). Mrs Cruikshank found gold on her first outing. She quickly expressed her intention of resuming her work; and procuring enough to make some rings.
Victoria also had women at the genesis of one of its most significant gold finds. Following the discovery of gold in Ballarat in August 1851, Margaret Kennedy and Julia Farrell began fossicking in their own backyards. Around the Bendigo Creek, in late September, they had their eureka moment. Unlike Hargraves, these respectable wives did not pursue celebrity. They continued quietly panning in the creek, and were soon joined by twenty thousand other entrepreneurial souls in the great rush to the Bendigo Valley, ‘the Winter diggings’.
There is also an even chance that Ballarat’s gold was discovered by a woman, since a correspondent to the GEELONG ADVERTISER in September 1852 revealed that the pioneer of the Eureka Lead was an unidentified Aboriginal person: Wathaurung people of both sexes were known to participate in gold mining.9
William Kelly was one of the first commentators to note the everyday sight of women engaged in hands-on mining. Out walking around the Eureka Lead one morning in early 1854, Kelly spied fossickers of the female sex at work, and these, too, of the diminutive degree both as to age and size. You can sense that Kelly longed to mock these mining maids, as was his inclination, but he drew himself up.
And here I must do the women the justice of remarking that their industry was accompanied with a decency of garb and demeanour which elicited respect and went to prove that becoming employment engenders respectability of feeling and healthy appetites.
Working-class women, of course, had always worked. The phenomenon that stopped Kelly short was the presence of ‘decent’ women performing acts of industry. It was just another of the transformations that women needed to effect to be successful in this strange new world.
Perhaps there was also something female-friendly about the work itself, for small-claim alluvial mining was in many ways a holdover from the pre-industrial domestic economy. The modest size of frontages discouraged the introduction of machinery, and working a claim relied on manual exertion rather than progressive technology. William Westgarth referred to the traditional mining cradle, in which gravel from a river’s bed was rocked to separate large rocks and nuggets from the fine particles of silt or gold dust, as this primitive and fatiguing implement. The work didn’t require great physical strength, though, or capital outlay: just patience, perseverance and bucket-loads of luck. Westgarth, writing in 1857, remarked on the peculiarly archaic state of mining technology in the wake of the industrial revolution. There are few vocations, he noted, that can boast such freedom from indebtedness to that great modern creditor in society’s progress—referring, of course, to science.
Ballarat, observed Westgarth, resembled not so much an industrial landscape as a great mercantile exchange, where co-partnering and share-holding—complex forms of interpersonal rather than technological exchange—were required to tap the deep leads that criss-crossed the goldfields. (And as if to flesh out Westgarth’s metaphor, many women were not just miners but active shareholders in the hundreds of mining ventures that were listed on the Ballarat Mining Exchange.10) Westgarth didn’t comment on the implications of such retrograde commercial operations for women; however, there is no doubt that women who wanted or needed to mine for gold benefited from this freedom from science and modernity.
Once regulations enabled larger-scale mining claims later in the 1850s, technology (particularly steam-driven pumping) quickly appeared. But in 1854, the editor of the GEELONG ADVERTISER noted that in the three years since gold’s discovery, little had changed in its mode of extraction. Gold is got by chopping, churning and manual dexterity, he wrote.11 Is this mining or making mince pies? Alluvial mining was indeed a great equal opportunity employer. MURRAY’S GUIDE TO THE GOLD DIGGINGS advised its readers that mining was a pursuit open to all who are strong enough…members of the learned professions [are] side by side with the refuse of the earth. Human garbage. And women.
Martha Clendinning and her sister had made a pact: even if other storekeepers on the diggings winked at the authorities, they would never sell sly grog on their premises. It was unlawful to sell wine, beer or spirits on any of Victoria’s goldfields, but everyone knew that practically every store, restaurant, boarding house and ‘refreshment tent’ could provide a nobbler on request. Though the laws to keep alcohol off the diggings had been a complete failure, Martha reckoned that she must hold to her own standards. She would only sell the best quality tea, coffee and sugar, candles, tobacco (the most important item), jams, bottled fruits, onions and apples and some excellent small Cheshire cheeses.
But Martha, the doctor’s wife, Anglo-Irish daughter of a Kings County JP, was not so high and mighty that she couldn’t read the democratic temper of the times. As Englishman John Capper wrote, The equality system here would stun even a Yankee. We have all grades and classes…The outward garb forms no mark of distinction—all are mates. Martha and Sarah determined to follow Mrs Massey’s advice and exchange broadcloth for fustian, toning down their well-bred appearances in the hope that we should not be distinguished as ‘ladies’. We intended to pass as merely respectable women of business; anything more than that would, we felt, expose us to curiosity when we entered on our storekeeping life. They didn’t want to intimidate the diggers. They didn’t want to lord it over the diggers’ wives. They wanted to blend in. But it was more than the desire to be inconspicuous: We prided ourselves on being careless of appearances. New chums passed themselves off as old hands by the unceremonious cut of their cloth.
The Clendinnings set up their tent site at the centre of a treeless field on Commissioner’s Flat, not far from where Charles and George Evans would establish their Criterion Auction Mart just a few months later. Martha volunteered to go to the Government Camp and purchase George Clendinning’s mining licence for him while he muddled about in a tangle of flaccid canvas. As this was official business, she put on her go-to-meeting clothes: black cashmere dress with two deep flounces and velvet folds on the edges, paisley shawl and straw bonnet trimmed with white ribbon. At the Camp, she admired the commissioners’ firmly tethered tent. I gazed with envious eyes on the erection, thinking of the sad confusion of her own tent. The commissioners were just as admiring of Martha’s appearance, for, according to Martha, the other women residents were of a very rough class. Martha declined a chair, and the licence was delivered to her promptly. Two diggers, who had been waiting half the day for the commissioners to deign to issue their licences, were astonished. ‘Well Bill’, said one, ‘the next time I want my licence, I’ll send my missus for it, instead of kicking my shins about here for hours’. ‘All right’, Bill replied, ‘but you must get your missus first, my boy’. Martha had a chuckle at her new-found influence.
Once George finally got it up, the Clendinnings’ tent—our first Australian home—was also Martha and Sarah’s store. Martha’s trademark yellow canary sang in a cage outside the tent. Martha procured her own storekeeper’s licence and opened for business. I never forgot my first sale! wrote Martha fifty years later: a box of matches for sixpence.
While their husbands got on with the hard and dirty work of mining, Martha and Sarah quickly established a loyal clientele for their humble wares. Martha bought a hen, a rare commodity on the diggings, and sold her eggs to mothers of sick children who could keep nothing else down. Soon there was more demand, for more goods, than they could supply. We were constantly asked for clothing materials by the women, but didn’t have enough room to store large bolts of cloth. But the savvy sisters could see that there was something in the Ballarat waters that encouraged astonishing fertility as well as dysentery. They decided to venture on a new branch of business: baby clothes. Theirs was the first store on the diggings to sell such dainty little garments. The delight of the women at the sight of them was beyond description.
Martha had tapped into a profitable sociological trend. Most of her customers were women, who often shopped together. At home, an English country labourer’s wife could only afford to clothe their babies in unbleached calico, coarse flannel and poor, common print. But now, those same women could delight in Melbourne-made goods, simple, but being all of white material and tastefully made, with little knitted woollen hoods. Such garments elicited the warmest admiration and envy. So while genteel women sought to downplay their class backgrounds by ‘blending in’ with the masses, former commoners were only too happy to distinguish themselves from the pack with dainty fripperies. Martha and Sarah soon sold out their modest supply of upmarket baby clothes and had to send to Melbourne for more stock. The business of frontier egalitarianism was clearly a matter of nuance. Anyone who could successfully negotiate its ambiguities and inconsistencies was onto a winner.
But Martha Clendinning did not just use women’s social aspiration to turn a profit. She was also astute enough to realise that immersing herself in the cultural landscape of the early diggings would give her a new freedom beyond her stifling old identity as a gentlewoman. If the rural farm girls aped her bourgeois trimmings, so Martha took her lead from the working class…to whom all species of employment for women seemed perfectly natural if they could carry it on with success. Suddenly it was merit, not birthright and breeding, that made all the difference.
Dr Clendinning was most anxious about the changes that had taken place in his tight family circle. His plan—persist with gold digging until the big find, then retire with all the decencies of the home life of a gentleman—was slow in coming to fruition. This gave Martha a legitimate reason to pursue her excessive folly, despite her husband’s concern that he might be blamed for allowing me to continue at it. While she was making money and George wasn’t, Martha would do as she pleased.
She was certainly a trailblazer, but Martha Clendinning was not the only woman to cash in on the diggers’ insatiable demand for supplies and services. Not long after Martha paved the way, twenty-eight-year-old Irishwoman Anne Diamond (née Keane) began retailing out of a large tent at Eureka, while her new husband Martin mined its lead. After meeting on the Star of the East, Martin and Anne had never formally married, but by the time they set up shop in Ballarat, Anne had taken Martin’s name and they were living as a couple. Sometime in early 1854, they had a baby who died. Not ones for paperwork, they registered neither its birth nor its death.12 The precise location of Anne Diamond’s store would prove to have disastrous consequences in the summer of ’54.
Phoebe Emerson also ran a store at Eureka. Phoebe had grown up in the coal mining regions of northern England. Her father was an engineer and the choirmaster and organist at Durham Cathedral. Phoebe married George Emerson on her twentieth birthday and the couple sailed to Victoria the following year. George suffered from a lung infection (which finally killed him in 1857) and Phoebe ran the store to provide the newlyweds with their livelihood. She kept several savage dogs for protection and a loaded gun to deter any foolishness near her store.13
Twenty-two-year-old Irish immigrant Mary Davison King also slept with a loaded pistol under her pillow when her husband Alexander was away from their store buying stock. Mary had migrated to Victoria soon after her marriage to Alexander and headed straight to the diggings, so they must have had some capital to seed their business. Like Martha Clendinning, Mary acquired hens and made a pile selling eggs to the Ballarat miners at eighteen pence per egg. Mary had her first baby, Henrietta, in her tent in 1854, the second, Emma in 1855, and nine more in the next seventeen years.14
Mrs Eakin also ran a store at Eureka. Henry Mundy described her as a tall, pleasant looking woman with very engaging manners, a real lady. Henry’s new wife, Ann, took heart from her husband’s respect for Mrs Eakin. After their marriage, Ann was anxious to make herself useful in doing something to make money, so she began a grocery business and circulating library. After the birth of their first son, however, Henry changed his tune. It was his responsibility to provide for his wife and child. Ann wanted to make clothes to sell to a draper’s shop, but Henry wouldn’t hear of it. What nonsense you are talking, of taking in sewing to keep the house, he thundered. By God I’ll get a living for us!
Older and longer married, Thomas Pierson wasn’t so proud. He and Frances set up a large heavy canvas tent (nine metres by five) for a store, which Frances ran in addition to a slightly smaller tent with a wooden carpet for their domicile. In early 1854, Thomas and son Mason joined a party of Americans in a claim, resolved to extract reward for their sacrifice. Thomas hated Ballarat, considering it a most miserable, disagreeable, unhealthy place unfit for a white man to live in. It was also a place of extremes. The weather was one thing. On 27 February Thomas reported that there were squalls and rain, with the wind blowing hard and a mere fifty-six degrees Fahrenheit. The day before had been over a hundred degrees. The social temperature was equally tempestuous. There was great wealth, which profited Frances in her storekeeping, but according to Thomas few other places could produce the same amount of destitution, poverty and want.
It is possible to live in most cities of the world and not have a clue how the other half lives. Ghettos of the poor are geographically isolated from enclaves of the rich. But in the tent city of Ballarat, where Jack was supposed to be as good as his neighbour, Jack could very clearly see that his neighbour was feasting on German sausages and Cheshire cheese while he and his brood ate damper and flyblown mutton—again. Advertisements for stores in Henry Seekamp’s BALLARAT TIMES, which first began circulating in March 1854, reveal the astounding range of goods available for sale: red herrings, fresh salmon, Chilean flour, smoked bacon, fresh ground coffee, Normandy pippins, Cavendish tobacco, Havana and Manila cigars, fresh oysters and lobster, preserved partridge, grouse, woodcock, lark, plover and hare, preserved peaches, apricots, prunes and plums, French jams and jellies, fancy, soda and water biscuits, Cork butter, and the list goes on.
Apart from such delectable consumables, there was a vast array of merchandise on offer. Mrs Willey, who ran the Compton House store on Bakery Hill (red flag with white ball, for those who couldn’t read her sign), advertised the following wares: parasols, silk, satin, glacé and muslin mantles, china crape and French cashmere shawls, Irish linen and calico, widows caps, ladies and babies underclothing and French kid boots. Refreshment tents sold ginger beer and cordials over the counter, and gin, brandy, whisky, porter and shandy-gaff under it.15 You could get a dozen bottles of French champagne if you could afford it. The stores were astonishingly well stocked with everything that could be wanted, wrote Mrs Massey, with the most conspicuous display of dresses, bonnets and quantities of china. Jill knew exactly what she was missing out on if Jack’s claim bottomed out.
You can almost see the vindictive, self-righteous spittle fly from the aggrieved lips of Thomas Pierson as he ups the ante on his family’s future: we determined sticking to it a while yet to make something out of this country if we can as we think it owes us something. A dangerous position: to hold a grudge, to feel a sense of entitlement.
On 1 March 1854, the Piersons attended a monster meeting of similarly disgruntled storekeepers, a show of strength against the new law to tax storekeepers £50 a year or £15 for three months. There were by now three hundred stores at Ballarat. One Ballarat resident estimated that at least two-thirds of the stores on the diggings were run by the wives while their husbands mined during the day and perhaps conducted the business in the evening—generally the sly-grog portion of the business.16 In late February, sixty storekeepers, including the Piersons, had been taken to court and fined £5 for being unlicensed. It was extortion, fumed Thomas. The fine was particularly unreasonable when residents were being asked to subscribe private funds to build a hospital. The problem, according to Thomas, was this: the English nobility send out their Bastard children to make unprincipled and contradictory laws. But what was to be done? At the meeting, the storekeepers resolved to refuse en masse to pay the licence fee. By the end of March they had all caved in. Mark the independence of Englishmen, wrote Pierson in his diary entry of 25 March, then compare them with Americans who would never quietly submit to illegal taxes and the unjust imposition of fines.
That night a huge thunderstorm burst over Ballarat and it rained and hailed for a week solid, turning the parched ground of summer into rivers of mud. Frances Pierson packed up her store and moved it to higher ground.
In his 1958 classic The Australian Legend, Russel Ward commented on the ‘curiously unconventional yet powerful collectivist morality’ that existed on the Victorian goldfields. Ward traced the origins of this ethos to the teamwork required for deep lead mining (a line of analysis that also runs strongly through the work of Bate and Blainey) and the common arrangement of one miner acting as a tent keeper and cook while the rest of the team worked the mine. This group solidarity, Ward argued, was reinforced by the uniformly despised practice of licence-hunting. Ward pointed out that Victorian diggers called their co-workers ‘mates’, in contrast to the Californian term ‘partner’, signifying a comradely rather than commercial relationship. The close affiliation of the Australian labour movement with the history of mining disputes tends to support Ward’s case.
But Ward did not explore another unusual aspect of this Australian egalitarian affinity: the inclusion of women in its companionable embrace. As more women flocked to the fields, the traditional feminine activities of housekeeping, cooking and laundering increasingly fell to them. And a curious thing happened. Instead of these domestic jobs being devalued as women stepped in (a trend modern economists call the ‘feminisation of labour’, with concomitant loss of pay and status), the goldfields women found themselves highly prized. I have become a sort of necessity, remarked Irish-born Harriet, who travelled to the diggings with her brother and quickly became a pseudo-wife to his single buddies. Harriet was paid in gold nuggets for her puddings and pies and earned great respect for her conversation and companionship besides. In closing her letter home, Harriet echoed the words of many other former blue-blooded girls after a stint on the goldfields: I almost fear to tell you, that I do not wish it to end! 17
Being paid for domestic work without having to enter service—no contract, no term of duty, no master—was a revelation to working-class women on the goldfields. It was like freelance domestic service. Public housekeeping. Many women found regular employment as tent keepers for single men. Some older women, often widows, set themselves up in business as boarding-house keepers or licensed victuallers. As a result, women left their bonded service in towns and on stations and headed to the diggings. They may have wound up doing the same work—cooking, child minding, wet nursing—but they did it on their own terms, informally aligned to a team rather than a single master or mistress. The going rates were good too, set by a bull labour market for domestic services. Mrs H. Fitchett, who ran the Victoria Labour Market, an employment service, regularly posted the fair price for servants in the GEELONG ADVERTISER in 1854. Housemaids could expect £26 to £30 per annum, cooks £30 to £40, laundresses £30 to £35 and nursemaids £20 to £24.
These rates were still low compared to male wages—stock riders, bullock drivers and waiters could expect double the amount—but, due to the scarcity of female servants, they were noticeably superior to English wages.18 Moreover, in the golden age of mineral excavation, there was one paid domestic worker for every three miners.19 Australia might have ridden into existence on the sheep’s back—and was then stampeded to international prominence with a resources boom—but in the mid-nineteenth century its prosperity was underpinned by the taxable value of women’s work.
And women knew it. They had only to look at the latest issue of MELBOURNE PUNCH to realise that everyone knew it. It was called ‘the servant problem’. The social crisis wasn’t so much that unprecedented numbers of women were being paid for their domestic labour, but that such women were calling the shots. PUNCH printed cartoons that illustrated the farcical implications of untutored young women telling urbane old masters where to go. In one, a girl leaves her master for the simple reason that he has not supplied her with copies of PUNCH to read. In another, the young servant expects her master to chop the wood.
It was what they call colonial bounce, surmised Mrs May Howell when her newly hired servant couldn’t decide on a suitable starting date. She means to come, but thinks as this is a free country she must show herself independent. William Westgarth summed up the new-found power of domestic servants with wry regard: Victoria was the sort of place where a housemaid agreed to a temporary trial of her new mistress. But Westgarth’s dry wit allowed him to make a more intoxicating point about the radical potential for change in a colony which exhibited an equality of consideration for all classes, and by consequence a political and social inclusiveness. He chose a decidedly gendered metaphor to illustrate this transformative process. In Victoria, traditional social gradations were thrown off like a loose mantle in an unabashed disrobing process. A sociological striptease.
Every folk tale has its wicked witch. In gold rush Victoria, the washerwoman represented the spectre of a world turned upside down. A new world where wives earned more money than their husbands, working women determined the parameters of their employment, and manual skills counted for more in the marriage and labour market than drawing-room refinement.
This world is magnificently captured in an illustration by John Leech titled ‘Topsy Turvey—or our Antipodes’, issued as a frontispiece to London PUNCH in 1854. Here on the Victorian diggings is a cast of larks and heroes from an imperial nightmare. A group of ruffians play cards while a Master of Arts brings them beer. At the table sits a pipe-smoking woman. She is being served spirits by a genteel lass who is barefoot and sunburnt, her face blackened by exposure. Meanwhile, an Intellectual Being plays manservant to a bearded miner, while another gentleman takes off the muddy boots of a pistol-toting brute. Behind them, a fat, ugly old hag wearing pearls and self-satisfied smirk—here is our washerwoman—is being given piano lessons by a delicate English rose. It is a charming tableau of class, racial and gender mayhem.
William Kelly was quick to grasp the figurative dimensions of the washerwoman. His pen portrait has her dressed for the washing tub. Her hair is tied up in knot and fixed with a huge gold pin with a father-o’-pearl head. She’s wearing a satin dress and an apron, a pair of massive bracelets clasped on her bulging wrists and a heavy watch chain around her neck, stuffing a carved timepiece into her virtuous bosom. Here, says Kelly, is a colonial substitute for crochet-work, a contemptible economy. Imagine a mere washerwoman decking herself out in satin and gold instead of her homespun. James Bonwick was positively apoplectic. The sheer muddy filth of mining meant that washing was a necessity, not a luxury. But could a man expect sympathy from a washerwoman? Apparently not. These heartless creatures, wrote Bonwick, the laundresses, treat us in town with perfect disdain, and only occasionally and grudgingly favor us with a stony bosom. And what worse fates on the goldfields! Bonwick had a remedy. He advised bachelors to woo a wife, then she would have no option but to wash his shirts. And, presumably, provide a more welcoming breast.
The real problem was not the airs and graces or the reluctant favours; it was the equal economic footing in a land that valued wealth above rank or status. MURRAY’S GUIDE TO THE DIGGINGS pointed out that in Victoria carpenters, blacksmiths, cooks and washerwomen make nearly as good a living as the diggers. Most were paid in gold dust, just as an earlier band of Australian upstarts had been paid in the scarce commodity of rum. Like domestic servants, washerwomen could afford to pick and choose their clients and set boundaries on their working lives. Unlike domestic servants, washerwomen were typically older, sometimes married, deserted or widowed, or someone’s mother. They were unlikely to be wooed into marriage and rejoin the ranks of unpaid domestic officers. Washerwomen thus symbolised the social and economic power of working women on the early colonial frontier. They were the allegorical ‘gold-diggers’ of ’54, only they didn’t dig or dance or sing for their supper. The source of their power was external. It was vested in a wafer-thin historical moment when women’s scarcity and indispensible labour coincided with the culture of utilitarian democracy.
For all those men who didn’t have a wife and couldn’t afford to hire one, Sunday was washing day on the diggings.
No one expected any different.