Spare a thought for Sarah Skinner.
By May 1854, Ballarat was under siege. The wet season had come early. The summer of 1853 had been dry, and now the heavens had opened themselves upon an impermeable earth. Wind blowing hard for three weeks, Thomas Pierson recorded in his diary. Charles Evans wrote of the dull cloudy atmosphere and almost incessant rain. Mining operations had practically ceased. John Manning, the schoolmaster at St Alipius, where Anastasia Hayes was working as a teacher, complained that few of the seventy-four children on his roll were in attendance owing to the severity of the weather.1 Abandoned mine shafts used by the diggers as haphazard latrines became putrid cesspools. Miners who had slept rough during the warm months were suddenly vying for beds in the boarding-house tents that had been popping up as a result of the feminine exodus from the township. Bad weather meant good business for entrepreneurial women.
But Sarah Skinner was not one of those women. Sarah Skinner lay on her own rude cot in her own flimsy tent, listening to the wind and rain lash the useless fly as she struggled to deliver her baby into this sodden world. In a delirium, driving rain can sound like fire. For Sarah, everything burned. Her brow ran with sweat. The tender, swollen skin of her vulva stretched like taut canvas. A final push sent a searing tear through her perineum. She screamed; the baby wailed. Their tandem howl floated into the spectral blaze of the night. William Skinner stood by, frantic with worry, as ineffectual as a handkerchief in a tempest.
On Saturday 13 May 1854, Sarah Skinner gave birth to a live and healthy baby boy. The baby’s lusty cries were music to the ears of midwife Jane Julian, Sarah and William’s neighbour. Two weeks later, Jane testified at the inquest into Sarah’s death2 that she was not a regular midwife but [had] attended a few females in their confinement. She’d done her best. On the day after the birth, Sarah was well, sitting up nursing her baby and laughing with her older child. But that night, said Jane, the new mother was seized with cold shivering. William Skinner, twenty-seven, son of a Devon miner, sent for Dr William Wills (father of the doomed explorer). Dr Wills attributed Sarah’s fever to her milk coming in.
Over the next week, Sarah continued to ail. Dr Wills now diagnosed puerperal peritonitis—the grimmest reaper of nineteenth-century childbirth—and ordered the standard treatment for postpartum infection: turpentine injections into the abdomen, turpentine enemas and blistering of the bowel, followed by an application of mercury to the open wounds. Opium every two hours.
A medical text from 1785 gives us an indication of how Sarah was faring as Wills attended her.
Child-bed fever…begins, like most other fevers, with a cold or shivering fit, which is succeeded by restlessness, pain of the head, great sickness at stomach, and bilious vomiting…A great pain is usually felt in the back, hips, and region of the womb;…and the patient is frequently troubled with a tenesmus, or constant inclination to go to stool. The urine, which is very high-colored, is discharged in small quantity, and generally with pain. The belly sometimes swells to a considerable bulk…a bilious or putrid looseness, of an obstinate and dangerous nature, comes on, and accompanies the disease through all its future progress.3
Sarah’s baby also began suffering bowel complaints and bloody stools. He died by the end of his first week, without a name, and was laid to rest five days later. Dr Wills gave weakness as the official cause of death. Sarah was too fragile herself to attend the quiet burial. She knew what it looked like, having already put two other babies in the ground.
A distraught William Skinner fetched another medical man, Dr Stewart, who considered the baby’s demise to have been caused by the mother’s milk. Dr Stewart observed Sarah’s deteriorating condition and, though he continued the enemas and blistering, claimed it was beyond human skill to save her life. He denied her the last-ditch treatment of leeching the abdomen, though leeches were abundantly available from the many pharmacists retailing on the Ballarat goldfields. Almost two weeks after the birth, and two days after his son’s funeral, William Skinner held his wife’s limp, clammy hand for the last time.
At Sarah’s inquest on 25 May, the coroner pronounced that the woman had died from natural causes. A jury of William’s peers added a rider to the verdict: We consider that if a little more attention had have been paid the deceased by the medical man her days might have been prolonged. The now-widowed William Skinner was, in a perverse way, one of the lucky ones. Although his wife’s body was a bloated, festering, bloody pulp by the time the doctors had finished ‘attending’ her, he had managed to secure professional services. In that, at least, he had succeeded.
Fellow miner Patrick Carey was out shooting possums for dinner when his baby son succumbed to the fever that had racked him for days. The coroner asked Patrick why he hadn’t sent for medical assistance. His reply: Because we had not a blessed sixpence in the tent.4
The idea that the Australian gold rush produced a classless society, founded on the sort of egalitarianism that only a resources boom can buy, is one of the enduring myths of the Eureka legend. From the beginning, Ballarat was a competitive environment. How could it be otherwise, when its raison d’être was the lucky strike? And in competitive environments, there are bound to be winners and losers. In their classic text The Psychology of Gambling, Jon Halliday and Peter Fuller define gambling as ‘a redistribution of wealth on the basis of chance and risk, an event that always involves loss to one party and gain to another’. The psychological and sociological bedrock of the gold rush ethos was, in fact, the antithesis of egalitarianism.
Here lies the paradox of diggings society: a world turned upside down, but not levelled. Who wanted to be a millionaire? Everyone. How many succeeded? Few. What was the difference? Chance.
For most punters on the early Victorian goldfields, successful mining required three things: diligence, stamina and a godsend. It is said by some, wrote Henry Mundy, there is no such thing as luck, that every man is the architect of his own fortune. Such people had never been gold digging. Swiss miner Charles Eberle agreed. It is a lottery, he concluded after a long tour of duty in Ballarat.5 Ellen Clacy called the diggings the lottery fields. In this game of chance, Mother Nature was the house.
In Ballarat, it was geology that safeguarded her stash. The lines of gold deposits were capricious and uncertain, as one miner put it, following the subterranean maze of buried rivers. On the surface, the creeks and gullies revealed nothing of what lay beneath. Deep lead mining was like recreational fishing, casting a line into a dark pool in the pure hope of a bite. But deep lead mining was also dangerous, costly and time-consuming work, requiring fortitude but little manual skill or technical knowledge.
You could sink a shaft not ten feet from your neighbour’s claim. You could both dig; both line your shaft with split timbers to hold the loose ground, and bucket out the constant cascade of seeping water. You could both wallow in the cold and dark and wet (or, in summer, hot and foetid) earth for five, six, nine months. And he might hit the gold-infused riverbed while your hole dropped over a bend in the gutter, missing the mark. He wins. You lose. Rock bottom. Duffered out. A shicer. But still you have to pay your licence fee, month in, month out, gold or no gold.
The deep lead mining of Ballarat, wrote Geoffrey Blainey in The Rush That Never Ended, ‘was therefore more of a gamble than any other branch of gold mining’. Like childbirth, deep lead mining was exhilarating, wildly profitable, completely ruinous, risky business.
Eberle’s conclusion that mining was a lottery was tinged with disgust, not devil-may-care jouissance. He reckoned he’d been sold a pup. The gilded imagination of European publicists has, with few exceptions, Eberle considered, influenced the general attitude. Expectations of easy pickings were still high, even in late 1854 when Eberle left Lausanne. But it did not take long for the scales to fall from our eyes. For Eberle and so many others, it was a bitter deception. Still, as the experts will tell you, ‘loss chasing’ is an important component in the psychology of gambling, inducing players to persevere longer and raise the stakes higher in an attempt to recoup misdirected finances, time and pride.
Thomas McCombie was quick to point out that the independent diggers of the early 1850s were not the professional miners of the 1860s. The former were only in the game, he believed, for short-term gain or failure. Mining was not a regular calling, as it would become for the salaried men of the syndicalised mining companies that had already begun taking over operations by late 1854. The amateur gold diggers knew little of science, engineering, metallurgy, chemistry or geology—all subjects that would be taught at the Ballarat School of Mines from 1870. No, the early diggers, said McCombie, were purely individual speculators, anxious about their families, eager to make a killing and go home. That they could not earn enough to buy an egg, let alone a passage, was the hard-luck story told around countless campfires. Young Martin Mossman poured out his tale of woe in a letter to his Aunt Hetty. He went to the diggings three times, but had no success. He was poorer than when he started. I have no good fortune, he wrote, I am not a lucky digger. Martin’s Uncle Charles, on the other hand, went into a speculation and is now worth £40,000. Uncle Charles was coming home, but I am just worth what I carry on my back, wrote Martin.6
What’s more, 1854 represented a significant turning point in the attitude of many immigrants to rolling the dice. Antoine Fauchery, a French digger and photographer who lived at Ballarat from 1852 to 1854, reflected on the mounting disillusionment with short-term gold mining:
In 1853 if you took ten emigrants, nine of them would have worked resolutely on the diggings, while the tenth would, with great regret, have gone in for business. Towards the middle of 1855, the proportions were completely reversed. Out of ten emigrants nine were speculating in something or other—tool handles or lemonade at a penny a glass, and the tenth, stripped of all resources, kept to his pick, but with what ill grace.7
The assumption of easy pickings had put the wind in the sails of over a quarter of a million immigrants between 1852 and 1854. By mid-1854, things were changing. And the longer people—especially family men—spent embedded in unsuccessful speculations, the deeper the hole they seemed to have dug for themselves.
The conditions of life on the goldfields were to a certain extent ‘democratising’: everyone was in the same leaky boat, regardless of rank, breeding, qualification, nationality or religion. There was only one place you could have a baby and that was in a tent. The rough, raw newness of it all made for a sort of temporal and material parity. But this pioneer equivalence was in itself such a wild anomaly that most everyone felt the need to comment on it. MURRAY’S GUIDE described gold digging as a pursuit open to all who are strong enough…members of the learned profession side by side with the refuse of the earth. Thomas McCombie commented that the many persons of birth and education [were] rather difficult to recognize in their blue serge shirts and cord small clothes. It’s fair to say there was an obsessive focus on the ease with which clothes could disguise caste, a simple sleight of hand overturning centuries of vigilant class-consciousness.
Why did Sarah Skinner’s placental site turn septic, while the other women attended by Jane Julian survived? Nothing was dependable; everything was a matter of happenstance. The straitjacket of the Old World had not been undone, simply re-laced. It felt like a bitter deception indeed. Who could be made to blame?
Martha Clendinning didn’t need a demographer to crunch the numbers and suggest a marketing plan for her shop. She could see with her own eyes that Ballarat was experiencing a baby boom. With no hospital or midwifery services, Ballarat’s tent city rang with the cries of birthing. At least one pharmacist advertised breast pumps to relieve the agony of hyper-lactating new mothers. (Milk fever, which we now call mastitis, was a painful and, before antibiotics, a potentially fatal infection. Dr Stewart was not unreasonable in suspecting Sarah Skinner’s bursting breasts as the cause of her delirium.) It also did not take George Clendinning long to realise that he could lay his hands on more reliable sources of profit than his barren mine shaft. By 1856, Dr Clendinning had hung out his shingle as a Coroner, Surgeon and Accoucheur at Bakery Hill.
In 1850, one birth was registered in Ballarat. In 1851, there were five. That figured doubled to ten in 1852 and leapt to twenty-eight in 1853. Then, in 1854, 404 babies squalled their way into life. Those women not having babies were busy making them. In 1855, there were 756 registered births and in 1856 that figure almost doubled to 1242. You might expect the rate of increase to have remained constant as Ballarat grew into a fully-fledged town with schools and other institutions of progress. But that’s not what happened. In 1860, there were 1652 births and by 1880, 1216. For the rest of the nineteenth century, there was never as much per capita procreation going on as there was in 1854 and 1855.8 In mid-1850s Ballarat, there was not only a resources boom, but also a baby boom.
How to explain the demographic spike? Most obviously, the population of Victoria was—overwhelmingly—young. In 1854, sixty-two per cent of the population was between the ages of fifteen and forty-five, and the majority of these were between twenty and thirty. The trend was even more pronounced on the goldfields, where the character of the population was seen as inextricably bound to its remarkable youth. Robert Caldwell described the digger genus as young, impulsive, generous and restless [with] amazing energy. To James Bonwick, the demographic profile of Victoria was a metaphor for statehood. Once we were a sheep walk, he wrote, now we are a gold field. So young and yet so celebrated…already the talk of the world. Elizabeth Massey saw nothing but romance in Victoria’s young people of active energetic habits.
Others saw danger. Excitement can mean enthusiasm, but it can also mean agitation.9 Canadian Samuel Huyghue was employed as the chief clerk to Resident Commissioner Robert Rede at the Ballarat Camp in 1854. He doubted the government was up to the task of responding to the mixed multitude, eager for enterprise and revelling in a sense of freedom and anticipation. Instead of finding constructive ways to deal with the progress of the tide, he feared the government would do its best to restrain these new born impulses. So far, its chosen method of sandbagging was an exorbitant tax enforced at the point of the bayonet.10 Those wielding the weapons, as well as those making the rules, were themselves young men. The average age of the soldiers of the 12th Regiment, permanently stationed at Ballarat, was 21.7 years; the average age of the 40th Regiment, later brought in as reinforcements, was 28.2 years. Huyghue described the soldiers of the 40th as half weaned cubs of the Lion Mother.11 Both Huyghue and Resident Commissioner Rede were positively ancient at thirty-nine years old. Assistant Commissioner James Johnston—dear Jamie—was twenty-eight when he married Margaret Brown Howden in August 1854 and took her to Ballarat as his bride. By the time they arrived, twenty-three-year-old Margaret was pregnant. Her honeymoon conception would soon turn into a nightmare gestation.
The majority of the goldfields population laboured under a common illusion of youth: the idea that honest industry and good intentions would bring just rewards. They were wrong.
The well-being of a colony, wrote James Bonwick in 1852, is intimately associated with marriage. This is just what the state wanted its restive citizens to believe. The discovery of gold might have resulted in moral chaos, but it had been noted since the 1840s that the lack of women’s ‘civilising influence’ had led to sodomy, prostitution, the sexual abuse of Aboriginal women and killing of mixed-race babies, as well as that thorny old perennial of social control, drunkenness. Governor La Trobe’s vision was that social stability would result from equal numbers of the sexes. From 1852, the government’s interest in importing women into the colony changed from supplying labour to rectifying the gender imbalance.12 Boatloads of young assisted female immigrants would arrive, they hoped, to be snapped up at the wharves by the hordes of eligible bachelors. Statistically, the design worked. In 1850, there were 2668 marriages registered in Victoria. In 1853 this had skyrocketed to 6946 recorded nuptials. But then a curious thing happened. Despite the steady increases in population, the targeted migration programs and the hefty demographic bulge in the twenty to thirty age bracket, the marriage rate remained remarkably flat. There were only 7760 marriages in 1854, 7816 in 1855 and 8254 in 1856. This suggests that although it was a seller’s market, women were choosing not to put up their wares.13
There’s no doubt that women in Victoria felt a power in the marriage stakes that they had never experienced before. Ellen Clacy arrived in Victoria in the winter of 1852 as a single woman accompanied by her brother, and departed in April 1853 on the arm of her husband. On her return to England, she wrote an advice manual for women desiring to emigrate. Do so by all means, she counselled, the worst risk you run is that of getting married and finding yourself treated with twenty times the respect and consideration you may meet in England. The reason for this unaccustomed reverence? According to Ellen, the imbalance of the sexes meant we may be pretty sure of having our own way.
Englishman Henry Catchpole, who arrived in Melbourne in February 1854, wrote home to encourage his sisters to emigrate and get a Golden Husband. Tell them that it is a first rate opportunity for them. After six months in the colony, he was still on message. There are many young chaps looking out in Melbourne when the ship comes in, wrote Henry. I shall soon begin to think about doing the same for I am really sick and tired of so much male society. Henry expressed unease that men of thirty to forty years of age were actually marrying girls at 15 and 16 on these diggings due to the numerical disproportions.14 It was a competitive market for wives. Some women talked of men as if they were prize studs, assessing their attributes with an air of studied detachment. There is a hardiness and manliness about the colonial gentlemen which I find pleasing, wrote Mary Bristow.
If women could pluck husbands like so many wild flowers, why do the marriage statistics suggest they were reluctant to do so? For some daughters, life in the colonies meant the blessed chance to escape—at least for a defined period of their choosing—the cloying family obligations and small horizons of parish life. Most of them literate, with an exalted sense of entitlement, these harbingers of change no longer looked to the past (or their parents) for example. Catherine Chisholm, a thirty-three-year-old unmarried woman from rural Scotland, was constantly chided by her family for not sending more news of her comings and goings in Victoria, including her marriage in 1857, four years after her arrival. We are greatly astonished at you for not mentioning anything concerning your husband, scolded Catherine’s brother Colin, taking up the paternal authority of her recently deceased father. Even what is his name, is he a native of the colony, or is he a native of Britain and what is he at for his daily bread. Away from prying eyes, some gold rush women enjoyed the anonymity of distance.15
The fact that women of humble birth could make discerning (and secretive) choices about their prospective partners bordered on the subversive. The imperial anxiety caused by this unexpected development is perfectly captured in another of John Leech’s cartoons for London PUNCH. In ‘Alarming Prospect: The Single Ladies off to the Diggings’, Leach depicts the preposterous idea that instead of men choosing their brides at the wharf, the women were thumbing their noses at offers from decent, upstanding gentlemen and electing to head to the goldfields on their own. A cottage! Fiddle de dee Sir! exclaims one pretty bonneted lass. Bother yer Hundred Pounds and House in the Public line, says an imperious woman with head held high. The women help each other to debark from the ship, to the confusion and consternation of the men who thought they could prance in as shining knights and wander home with a full-time cook gratis.
Englishman Henry Catchpole revealed what men were forced to do when they could neither afford domestic help nor snare a wife. He wrote home to his mother, I can now roast meat, make plum puddings, pies and tarts…I’m a first-rate washerwoman, or if the lasses like, washerman…I am also a capital chambermaid. Instead of digging for gold, young Henry was left shovelling his own shit.
In the anything-goes early years of the gold rush, tying the knot became a favourite avenue for conspicuous consumption. Fortunate diggers, observed Jane McCracken, would do anything to spend money and so be seen that they have it. What better way for a young man to prove to his peers that he has thrived and prospered than to show off a trophy bride? Saturday night in Collins Street, Melbourne circa 1854 was like a weekly Brownlow Medal count: a spectacle of tarted-up horseflesh arrayed in celebration of virility.16 Here, lucky diggers would come to town to parade their good fortune in the cultural phenomenon of the ‘Digger’s Wedding’. Ellen Clacy reported that diggers’ weddings were all the rage. Thomas McCombie described the event as an exhibition so fantastic and absurd that it symbolised the convulsion under which the social system of Victoria was at the time labouring.
This is the staging. A newly cashed-up digger would pay a woman to act as a model bride. He would deck her out in the finest wedding couture a nugget could buy, hire carriages and coachmen in gaudy livery, and purchase half the stock of the nearest pub. Very commonly, according to McCombie, the girl was a domestic servant (not a prostitute), a fat, stumpy girl, redolent of the most odious vulgarity, who would delight in being plucked out of an obscure kitchen and thrust into a situation of temporary notoriety. A crowd of intoxicated digger mates would march alongside the carriage all the way to the bayside suburb of St Kilda, where there would be a champagne dinner for all. The women drank too, leading McCombie to demur that the after-dinner orgies therefore need not be minutely detailed.
Like the line-crossing ceremony at sea, this was Carnival. Cinderella without the sentimental ending. Performance art. The sham wedding cocked a snook at the modes and morals of conventional respectability. In a mock wedding, the prosperous gent got to flaunt his success (without actually assuming the responsibilities of marriage) and the lucky lady got to keep her gowns and jewels (with a minimum of mutual obligation). James Bonwick had placed his civilised faith in the institution of marriage, but now found that the freedom of marriages led to grotesque and immoral scenes. It was not unheard of to spend £200 in a single evening. By the next morning, the carriage had turned back into a pumpkin and the digger returned to the goldfields to chase the next windfall. In the elaborate theatre of the Digger’s Wedding, the inversions and reversions happened virtually overnight. The only lasting change occurred if the ersatz bride contributed another entry to the expanding ledger of ex-nuptial pregnancies.
Remarkably, in 1854 there were seventy registered births in Victoria for which the name of the father is listed as unknown. The baby is given his or her mother’s surname. For some women, the father’s identity truly may have been a mystery. Others were simply unmarried. Registering the birth of a legally illegitimate chid was an extraordinary public disclosure and suggests that women were less eager to cover the tracks of ex-nuptial conception, and less likely to see another man’s child as an impediment to future marriage prospects, at a time when it was a seller’s market. It was also not uncommon for single mothers to apply to magistrates for maintenance orders for their children. Court reporters conveyed such cases without an overtone of scandal. This is fascinating, suggesting a lack of shame—even a sense of implied legitimacy—on the women’s part. In an era when the demand for popular rights and freedoms was a mounting clamour, even a woman beyond the pale of respectability might draw public attention to her quest for justice—and expect restitution.
The moment did not last. In 1855, fifty births were registered with an unknown father and in 1856—none! (Less than half a dozen ex-nuptial births per year were recorded over the next decade.) You can bet your last Trojan that ex-nuptial conception was still happening. But women were no longer prepared to out themselves. Cue the long reign of illegal abortions, shotgun weddings and benevolent homes for fallen women.
In the mid-nineteenth century, few women faced childbirth free of the well-founded fear of death. They weren’t just aware the odds were against them; they could feel it in their waters. In fact, women referred to their entire pregnancy as a period of sickness. In popular euphemism, to labour was to be ill. The linguistic delicacy made sense. Up until the 1940s, maternal death ranked second only to tuberculosis as a killer of Australian women aged between fifteen and forty-nine.17 There are no official maternal or infant mortality statistics available for the early period of Victoria’s history. But based on records from Melbourne’s Royal Women’s Hospital, historian Janet McCalman calculates that from 1856 to 1874, stillbirths fluctuated between four and eleven per cent, while maternal death rates could be as high as 4.5 per cent, or one in every 22.5 confinements.18 As these numbers were achieved in a hospital, with midwives and obstetricians on hand, it is likely the maternal mortality rate on the goldfields was much higher. Dr Walter Richardson (father of the author Henry Handel Richardson), who practised in Ballarat in the mid-1850s, estimated that seven per cent of full-term births ended in a fatality.19 He attributed this shameful record to the unsanitary squalor of Ballarat and the inadequate colonial laws that permitted unqualified charlatans and drunken illiterates to attend confinements on the goldfields, resulting in otherwise preventable deaths, stillbirths and deformities. International studies of maternal mortality in the nineteenth century support him: they show that the quality of obstetric care available to women was the definitive risk factor. Though malnutrition and other pre-existing health problems could contribute to childbirth complications, the single most important predictor of poor outcomes was access to an experienced accoucheur.
On the goldfields, as the diligent Dr Richardson attested, finding a good doctor was very chancy. Mothers, friends or neighbours were most likely to attend births on the diggings. Such women may or may not have had experience in delivering babies, particularly obstructed labours or high-risk deliveries such as twins or breech births. And prior to the development of antiseptic practices in 1870, post-partum infection was just as deadly following labour as maternal exhaustion and haemorrhage were during it. Henry Mundy noted that in Ballarat in 1854, a Mrs Charlton was the most famous midwife round her quarter. Mrs Charlton was a forty-five-year-old woman from Nottinghamshire who always had a joke and a pleasant word for everyone. But her patch may have been very small, limited to those in her immediate locality. It’s also not clear whether she was a trained or lay midwife. There is no evidence that there were any trained midwives practising on the early goldfields.
In all probability, Mrs Charlton provided her services cheaply. The same cannot be said for the goldfields doctors, who were largely reviled as opportunist vultures, extorting profit from a vulnerable population. The standard call-out fee for a birth was a whopping £5, the same amount as the fine for failing to show a valid mining licence.20 Dr James Selby came to Victoria in 1852 to become a digger. It quickly became apparent to him that he would make much more by my profession than gold seeking in the earth. He soon found that he had as much work as he could handle and, as people continued to flood onto the fields, the remuneration is increased tenfold. No man after practising here, wrote Selby, would be content to receive the London prices. (And he only charged £1 for a birth.)21 It didn’t help the community standing of doctors that, until 1865, there was no system of registration for legally qualified medical practitioners. Medical historian Keith Bowden has claimed that the Ballarat goldfields were ‘awash with quacks and imposters’.
Henry Mundy paid for two doctors and a midwife to attend the birth of his wife Ann’s first child. But not even this precaution could save the baby, who was sacrificed to salvage the mother—this generally meant cranial crushing to remove the baby from the mother’s body. Seventeen-year-old Ann suffered a long labour. All the women who busied themselves around Ann looked gloomy and distressed. Henry stayed out of the tent. For God’s sake…save my poor little wife’s life at all hazards, beseeched Henry, never mind the baby. Ann barely cheated death. Later, Henry buried the baby in a rough box on the side of a range and fenced the grave with barked saplings where no diggings were likely to occur. Come Ann’s second delivery a year later, she was dreading I should be as I was the last time, but thank God it was nothing this time like that. Baby George was born healthy and whole. I’m so thankful it is all over, said Ann, high on hormones, relief and the brandy she was given as the only form of pain relief.
When things went wrong in childbirth, the results could be ghoulishly catastrophic: cervical tears, prolapsed uteri, pelvic damage. British women were traditionally delivered lying on their left sides, which was thought to lessen the likelihood of perineal trauma. Women still tore, though, and the result would be a mangled anal sphincter and the lifelong opprobrium of faecal incontinence. Nineteenth-century midwifery practice included packing the vagina and perineal tears with rock salt. Women may also have had their knees tied together to facilitate healing.22 Yet recurrent infections at scar sites, exacerbated by repeated births—one child born every two years from age twenty to forty was the regular pattern—plagued women of all class, ethnic and religious origins. Childbirth was, perhaps, the only true social leveller.
Goldfields residents may have despised doctors for their extortionate fees, but doctors blamed midwives for the high rates of maternal and infant mortality. They were locked in a tussle for vocational supremacy that often went all the way to the courts. One such skirmish occurred when Mrs Katherine Hancock died eleven days after giving birth to her fourth child. Her birth attendant, Mrs Elizabeth Hazlehurst, was charged with manslaughter. Katherine was administered gin and sherry on the orders of the socially prominent Dr Wakefield. Mrs Hazlehurst testified that, in her opinion, the baby was wrong for the world and she had to turn it. (Katherine, before her death, reportedly remarked, if that was turning a child, she would not like to go through it again.) But the birth proceeded quickly and the baby was born with a fine head of hair, ready for the curling irons. Mrs Hazlehurst left, and a neighbour, Louisa Vining, stayed through the night. At the trial Mrs Hazlehurst explained she was employed as a midwife, not as a nurse tender. Dr Wakefield visited Katherine five days after the birth. He found her low and weak, with her uterus completely inverted and external to her person. She died five days later of mortification of the uterus. A post-mortem concluded that Katherine’s uterus was hanging from her vagina and some of her small intestines had also been pulled out of her body.
The court case turned on whether the use of stimulants had caused the inverted uterus. Dr Wakefield testified that labouring women were regularly given as much as a whole bottle of brandy, even by medical men. The real problem, he charged, was the ineptitude of Mrs Hazlehurst. I have attended thousands of women, never with a midwife in attendance, boasted Dr Wakefield. Other doctors agreed the only cause of uterus inversion could be gross ignorance and the expulsive power used for the birth of a child. The jury found Mrs Hazlehurst guilty, but made a recommendation to mercy. Their rider, it seems, was occasioned by the lengthy statement made by Mrs Hazlehurst in her own defence at the conclusion of the trial. This is how the BALLARAT TIMES reported her mercy plea:
She considered from her knowledge of medical terms, that she could have conducted her case better than [her defence lawyer] Mr Dunne; she attended the deceased purely from benevolence; she had been 16 year a midwife—never had a bad case, and was called, proverbially, ‘The Lucky Woman’. Dr Wakefield had a spite against her, and never had a previous opportunity of venting it. She had confined Mrs Vining herself, and with perfect success.
Mrs Hazlehurst then gave an extensive account of her midwifery experience and asked the judge to treat her leniently. Despite the fact that Mrs Hazlehurst had managed to impugn the reputation of both her lawyer and a high-flying doctor, the judge was persuaded by her testimony. The Lucky Woman was fined £20 and ordered to serve one hour in prison.23
It’s tempting to think that because death was a frequent and indiscriminate visitor in the nineteenth century, those touched by it were less psychologically wounded than we might be today, when science has given us more ‘illusory control’ than humanity has ever before enjoyed. Testimonies of goldfields mourners do not bear out this conceit. Deaths, particularly the deaths of children, were mourned with all the force of a lightning bolt to the heart. A child was considered born under a lucky star if she reached her first birthday on the goldfields.
The MINER AND WEEKLY STAR newspaper reported in January 1860 that of the sixty-one deaths in the Ballarat district in the previous two weeks, fifty-five were children, ninety per cent of whom were under eighteen months old. For the quarter ending in March 1861, in Ballarat alone there were sixty-seven deaths under six months, forty-nine under twelve months, twenty-six under two years and eleven under three years.
Dysentery was the great killer, closely shadowed by maras-mus (an archaic medical term for wasting caused by malnutrition, or what we would now call ‘failure to thrive’) and common diarrhoea.24 George Francis Train described Victoria as a place where children die like the spring flowers.
Mary Ann Tyler, the auspicious diggeress, lost her first baby soon after her birth. I cannot remember who was at the burial, Mary Ann recalled later, I was in such distress and kept fainting. Scottish immigrant Jane McCracken attended the funeral of her four-year-old nephew who drowned in a creek. It was a dreadful tryall for his Mother, wrote Jane in a letter home to Auchencrosh, as far as mind goes [she] has stood the bereavement much better than could be expected but she is very nervous and it has given her a great shock. Apart from base grief, Jane also gave another explanation for the earth-shattering effect of losing a loved one in Victoria. The funeral represented the laying of earth of the First of a Race in a New Country, the land of their adoption. An act of History in a Family, the consecrating of a sacred spot, that indissolvable [sic] link of connection to that soil. Burying the dead in a virgin country meant the start of history and an end to forgetting. Jane herself was terrified that such a destiny might be hers. There has been a good many died in their confinement or soon after it this season that I have heard of which made me more nervous, she wrote to her mother soon after the birth of her second child in April 1853. Death is making many changes among our acquaintances.
When Willie Davis Train became pregnant in May 1854, George Francis sent her back to America to have the baby. He wasn’t prepared to take the risk that this new baby would go the way of their first (who had died in America just prior to the Trains’ passage, so the decision wasn’t entirely rational). Men grieved for their lost babies too. Charles Evans was a young bachelor but he was a keen observer of human tragedy. Evans watched a miner suffer over the death of an infant. He noted in his diary on 8 November 1853 that the clinging insinuating love for a child is one of the greatest happinesses which the labouring man is blessed with and it is a hard trial for him to contemplate the sorrowful gap which the loss of one occasions.
People with strong religious convictions found a common way to bear up under their suffering. I suppose that I must now submit to that humble position in which it has pleased Providence to place me, wrote one woman when grappling with her fate. Divine Providence: the protective care of God. A belief in the higher wisdom and logic of Nature—the idea that there is a sovereignty or superintending power that is beyond our human control—was long the chief opium of the grieving masses. A merciful God would take away, but he could also give. There is an overruling Providence, wrote Jane McCracken, who orders all things wisely and well if we would only trust in him. God alone can give us either prosperity or adversity as he sees good for us. The flip side of the tragic was the miraculous.
But Jane was prescient in realising the dreadful temptation that stalked even the most devout believer in times of adversity. She warned, our carnal hearts is [sic] prone to discontent when worldly things seem to go against us.
A cartoon engraved by Samuel Calvert for MELBOURNE PUNCH in 1856 shows a digger sitting bolt upright in bed, rudely woken by the rain streaming through his patently un-waterproof tent. A dog cowers under the man’s stretcher. A tent-mate sits huddled under a blanket, face obscured. The title of the cartoon is ‘Domestic Bliss in Victoria’. But judging by contemporary accounts of tent living on the goldfields, a little precipitation was the least of your worries. A more chilling prospect was the alarming prevalence of domestic violence in Victoria.
Many female commentators noted that diggers could be rough in their manners, but seldom would they harm a woman. Martha Clendinning recalled that she was never disturbed in her tent at night while her husband was away. One male digger, who was far from enamoured of life on the goldfields, wrote in a letter to a friend, There is one thing, however—bad as the diggers are…I must do them the justice to admit that they prove themselves at least men where a woman is the case.25 Charles Rudston Read similarly noted that he never heard of any outrage or incivility towards a woman on the goldfields inflicted by a stranger. Yet, he added in ominous parentheses, (I have heard screaming and rows, but from whom did it proceed? Invariably husband and wife).
When a woman got spliced, the colonial idiom for either legal or de facto marriage, she took her chances that her new other half would not beat, rape or otherwise abuse her. Popular belief in the apocryphal ‘rule of thumb’—the maximum thickness of an item that could legally be used to beat a wife for the purposes of ‘correction’—was common but assault of a spouse was never in fact legally sanctioned. Rather, in the nineteenth century, wife beating was a widespread social custom, referred to by the French as the English disease.
The problem was that a woman had little practical recourse if she or her children were battered. The control a head of the household could exert over members of his family was paramount in western jurisprudence. A wife was construed as having the legal status of a chattel: an item of property, no better than a slave. Until the passage of the Married Women’s Property Acts in the 1870s, upon marriage a woman lost all rights to ownership of property, and even the custody of her children. Before the end of the 1850s, there was no means of divorce in the Australian colonies. It was not until 1878 that Britain passed laws to allow a woman to obtain a legal separation from a husband on the grounds of cruelty. But well into the twentieth century, as legal historian Jocelynne Scutt has written in her landmark investigation into domestic violence in Australia, ‘the courts continued to enshrine the position of head of family as one to be occupied by a dominant male person, with wife and children submissive adjuncts to his authority’.26
It is impossible to know whether women tended to suffer more at the hands of men they met and married in Victoria, or partners whom they had accompanied across the seas. What is clear, however, is the profound impression that domestic violence had on those who witnessed it on the goldfields. Perhaps this was an effect of the intimacy of living in a tent city, where everything and everyone was experienced up close. Just as you could see through canvas backlit by a candle, so too the sounds of internal struggle could not be muffled. Just as the cries of labour and birth could be heard throughout the immediate vicinity, so too the thumps and screams of a thrashing. The inescapability of family violence on the goldfields startled the largely middle-class chroniclers who had not previously lived in such close proximity to members of the ‘lower orders’. It is a thoroughly discredited myth that the upper echelons of society are immune from spousal abuse; still, on the goldfields a black eye received in a domestic assault was colloquially known as a Hobart Town coat of arms, a reference to the convict stain of Vandemonians.27
Martha Clendinning witnessed the beating of a butcher’s wife, a horrid looking woman. The woman, it was rumoured, was an old lag, transported for killing her baby. I saw the butcher fling her out of the tent and kick her savagely till the blood streamed from her face, wrote Martha, without evident emotion. Mrs Massey was horrified by what she saw of domestic bliss on the goldfields. Alas! Poor human nature, she wrote, most of the wives in the camp exhibit on their faces the brutal marks of their husbands fists. Sociologists and social workers report the spikes in domestic violence in the aftermath of floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters. On the goldfields women bore the brunt of men’s need to assert irrefutable physical authority at a time when all else was spiralling out of control. As the balance of gendered power shifted in women’s favour, bigger, more hardened fists could be trusted to beat them back down.
Was domestic violence a crude levelling mechanism, then, or a form of blood sport for the angry and aggrieved?
Thomas Pierson attributed the Victorian phenomenon of public pugilism to rampant intemperance. There are more taverns in Melbourne, according to the population, he wrote, than in any other place I ever saw and yet they are all full from the time they open until they close. It is very common here to see women fighting each other, men licking [beating up] women and women men. A few doors up from Frances and Thomas, a whole household were drunk and fighting one night. The next day they appeared one by one with black eyes and scratched faces. Charles Evans also witnessed the spectacle of a drunken woman staggering along a road on the Ballarat diggings. Her husband tried to drag her home by her wrist. She resisted, wrote Charles, and an interesting struggle took place much to the entertainment of a group of diggers. Henry Mundy recalled a wag playing a trick on this mate by beating an erring wife, thumping a bag of flour and a man’s voice yelling out ‘you call yourself a wife’…then an imitation of a woman’s voice. ‘You wretch you wretch you brute do you call yerself a man’. Thump went the blows again thick and heavy ‘oh oh’ in a wailing woman’s voice. The sham Punch and Judy show went on like this until a crowd rushed to the spot to save the woman from further ill treatment, only to be laughed at. Bare-knuckle boxing. Cock-fighting. Wife-beating. Anything for a dust-up and a wager.
Mrs Massey found the overt violence between men and women more confronting than humorous. She also came up with a plausible explanation for its origin. She too blamed the effects of drink, to which [the diggers] are tempted by disappointment to resort, in order to drown care. According to Mrs Massey’s theory, drink was a way to alleviate despair rather than frivolously pass the time. Once under the influence, the pent-up disenchantment of some diggers then detonated in a savage show of strength against their wives. This was often credited as being part and parcel of the ‘animal instinct’ of the lower orders. (James Bonwick advised frustrated diggers to shoulder their burdens by reading. Battle manfully for mental food, he counselled. When the intellect is starved, the moral power is weakened—thus leading good men, let alone inferior ones, into temptation.)
Jocelynne Scutt claims, however, that violence against women is not used as an outlet or circuit-breaker for frustration and despair (or boredom), but as a way to establish authority over someone who is perceived as a legitimate subject of male domination and control. This is most likely to occur when the man feels powerless: socially, culturally or economically undermined, his prerogative to govern threatened.
Whether by law or circumstance, women generally felt compelled to stand by their beastly man. Yet perpetrators of domestic violence could be forced into a form of public reckoning. Ballarat court records from 1854 and 1855 are full of cases of women hauling their husbands before the magistrates on charges of assault, using abusive language and threatening their life. In some instances, it appears the woman had tried to leave her husband. Elizabeth Johnson charged Thomas Johnson with threatening to have her back to live with him or he would take her life. The case was referred to the police for further investigation. John Williams was charged with beating his wife. He testified that he had not kicked her as she alleged; he had only given her one blow because she would not stay at home. He promised the judge he would not strike her any more but he hoped she would stay at home. The prosecutrix declared that her husband was in the habit of beating her, but had not done so much lately. Williams was bound to keep the peace for three months, with two sureties of £10.28 Many such cases ended by being settled out of court, or by both parties failing to appear. Women may have used the justice system as a way of leveraging power they could not otherwise muster. In doing so, they took a calculated risk that the act of public disclosure would not further inflame a husband whose self-esteem was already at rock bottom.
Court cases give us rare access to the voices of women who did not have the leisure or literacy to write diaries—a sneak peak behind closed calico. Mary Ann Clay, for example, charged George Copely with violently assaulting her. Mary Ann said on oath:
I am the wife of Elijah Clay of Ballarat. My husband had a few words with me on Thursday the 5th [of January 1854]. [Copely] began to interfere. He has one tent and we have another. I told him to mind his own business and affairs. He then called me most awful names unfit to mention. I went to sleep and he woke me by the names he was calling me. I went to his tent and asked what he meant by it and what he should interfere for in my husband’s business and mine. He jumped out of his bed and kicked me violently in the head and various parts of my body and ill-treated me and struck my child. The kicks and blows cut my head. I had told him that he had no business to interfere between me and my husband… The assault took place in the defendant’s tent. I used no bad language nor gave him any provocation. I swear positively that I was not drunk that day.
Copely pleaded not guilty. Police Magistrate John D’Ewes disagreed, and fined him £5 or one month’s prison.
Mary Ann had justice on her mind. At the same court session, she charged her husband Elijah with assault.
On Thursday night the 5th I went to a store on these diggings to pay for a dress I had bought. When I returned my husband said did you pay that pound I said yes. We had supper and afterwards we had some words. I wanted to reason with my husband but he would not hear. He beat me most dreadfully about my head and face. It was then he gave me the blow on the jaw. I forgave him for that blow.
Like Copely, Elijah Clay pleaded not guilty. But this time Mary Ann withdrew her complaint, and Elijah was ordered to find sureties of £40 to keep the peace for six months.
Because of the unprecedented economic opportunities available to women in the early gold rush, some found they could successfully leave abusive or otherwise damaging relationships. Eliza Perrin sailed to Victoria from Derbyshire in June 1853 with her daughter Fanny. Her husband John was already in the colony. The reunited family went to Ballarat. Before long, Eliza realised John was no more inclined towards gallant husbandhood than he had been in England. Her letters home are not explicit about the shame of domestic violence, but she alludes to it. Alas the one I was tied to was far from being what he ought to have been, she wrote to her cousin in 1859.
I will not say much in writing but as regards behaviour from him I have had about the worst. We might have been well to do if he had been like myself persevering but he carried on as he did at home with his drink and jealousy until at last I brought him before his betters and he was bound over to keep the peace for six months.29
After Eliza’s day in court, John left to live with his brothers. Eliza had been keeping a Refreshment House, but John drank and destroyed all that I had before he went away. John paid no maintenance for their three children and Eliza heard he was passing as a single young man. In the meantime, Eliza rebuilt her business, saving money and eventually building a public house for £70 on the main Melbourne to Ballarat road. Through her good relationship with Ballarat’s merchants, she was able to buy any amount of goods…all in my own name. It was only with my own endeavours that I had kept the 3 children and myself, wrote Eliza to her cousin.
He does not know that the house belongs to me or anything in it. The Divorce Act is not passed here yet or I would be rid of him altogether. I am determined he shall not live with me anymore. I only wish I had left him sooner and you had been out here. We should have had money in our pockets. I think of buying 2 or 3 acres of ground at the back [of the public house]…I am rearing poultry and fencing in a garden. I can hire a man for 15 shillings per week and find him meat that will pay me better than a miserable husband.
Eliza encouraged her cousin, who had a fatherless child, to come to Victoria. But never let it be known but what your husband is dead, Eliza advised. The women and their children could enjoy both the fruits of Eliza’s hard-won independence and the frontier trend for identity fraud.
The early gold rush period represents a unique state of social fluidity, as hundreds of thousands of people effectively became hunter-gatherers, classic nomads following one rush after another. Whole communities could disappear literally overnight, on the back of a rumour that a glittering new lead had been unearthed in a distant gully. Like solipsistic gypsies, gold seekers carried their homes on their backs and told their own fortunes.
But in a place where housing was temporary, clothing was rudimentary and work was almost exclusively manual, what was to distinguish the civilised folk from the so-called savages? To confuse matters further, the Wathaurung were not merely spectators of the curious ways of these feverish strangers; they were speculators in their own right, accepting the risk of remaining on their traditional lands, not just in fulfilment of spiritual obligations, but in the hope of economic reward too. If you looked closely, you could see white men acting like wild beasts while black men lived on the profits of their labours.
Some observers noted the success of Indigenous people in selling cloaks and rugs, yet, almost without exception, commentators chose to focus on the gender relations they observed among Aboriginal tribes. Robert Caldwell is typical. The natives, he wrote in 1854, are the most miserable beings…As among other savages, the women do all the work, while the men lie idle in the sun. He called up every racially charged cliché in the book: uncivilised, naked, heathen. To Caldwell, talk of Aboriginal land rights, which he had evidently heard, was nothing more than mawkish philosophy. He believed it was no more of an injustice to deprive the black man of his land than that of a kangaroo or cockatoo. The Aborigine did not possess it, because he did not cultivate it. And why did the Aboriginal man squander the opportunity to work the land? Because he was content to leave the poor squaws labouring under heavy loads, while the men burden themselves with little or nothing. Such an appalling lack of manliness was what set the Aborigines apart from the white diggers whose steadfast labour underpinned their virtue.
What was more, the blacks beat their women! J. J. Bond observed that when Aboriginal men were drunk at night, you could hear their loud yabbering and the howling of the lubras as their menfolk beat them. Thomas McCombie extended description to judgment. The domestic relations of the aborigines are only suitable to a race at the very bottom of the scale of refinement, he wrote. Evidence for the prosecution? They don’t marry, their women are given away against their will by male relatives, who are mean spirited enough to desire the wages of such prostitution, then are beaten if they won’t go quietly, even speared on the spot if very obstinate. The Aboriginal women, conceded McCombie, are naturally well-behaved, but are treated with cruel neglect, regarded by their menfolk as mere domestic slaves to obtain provisions or to drudge for them.
The fact that so many white men on the goldfields were dependent on their wives or other women for financial support was a contradiction that, unsurprisingly, went unremarked.
If Aborigines were condemned for the shabby treatment of their women, the Chinese diggers were reviled for an even greater sin: they did not bring their women with them at all. The fraught relationship between Europeans and Chinese on the goldfields is a well-worked claim in Australian history. School children are typically taught about the Lambing Flat riots on the Burrangong goldfields in New South Wales in 1861. In this incident, long-held anti-Chinese animosity spilt over into a brutal massacre, with thousands of miners actively rallying against the Chinese diggers to drive them off the field and the police called in to quell the riot.
But the forces of the state were hardly impartial adjudicators. The state-sanctioned discrimination of taxing Chinese immigrants to disembark in Victoria (which began in 1855) gave the lie to the idea of a utopian brotherhood of man under the Southern Cross. Classically, the complaints made against the Chinese were that they muddied the water holes through their tendency to work over the tailings of European diggers, that they worked on the Sabbath, that they were thieves and gamblers, and that they accepted low wages and would therefore drive down the value of labour. But in 1854, the chief grievance against the Chinese was their dubious, and possibly devious, homogeneity.
This was the problem: the Chinese kept to themselves. Though they seemed harmless, they came to Victoria in great numbers—thousands at a time, wrote one commentator—and stuck together, walking in long files to the goldfields and then setting up separate camps. Here, they ate their own strange food and dressed in their own strange costumes: high conical hats instead of the ubiquitous cabbage hat, loose gowns that looked like women’s attire and long pigtails that were similarly more suited to a schoolgirl than a working man. They practised their own medicine—acupuncture was readily available at the Chinese camps, and some Europeans availed themselves of its benefits—and they opened their own restaurants. They preferred opium to alcohol. And they diligently sent their winnings home to family members in China, where their wives were looking after the old and the young in the community in line with Confucian tradition, rather than blowing it on a spree. All this marked the Chinese out as different and peculiar.
But who might be hurt by John Chinaman? European women. This is what Mrs W. May Howell was warned when she went to the diggings. Oh the diggers would not annoy you, she was told by a friend. It’s those brutes of Chinamen; but they’d better not begin to insult white women, or they’ll find it rather dangerous. Though Mrs Howell’s friend admitted he had never heard of it happening at any diggings, you had to wonder at what a man wouldn’t be capable of when he had none of his own kind of woman about. And what better way to assert one’s own manliness than to threaten vengeance on any cur who dared touch his womenfolk?
Early in 1855, a scandal erupted in Melbourne that brought to a head all the disparate suspicion of the Chinese diggers’ masculine exclusivity. Police discovered a set of foul and wicked prints. The pictures, which were evidently of naked ladies (whether Chinese or European is not clear) and were said to bring the blush of shame and indignation into the cheek of respectable men, were being sold on the sly to Europeans. One writer, suspicious of Melburnians’ tendency to lurch from panic to panic, wrote an article on ‘The Chinese Puzzle’ in the MELBOURNE MONTHLY MAGAZINE. He was a lone voice in publicly defending the Chinese, pointing out their industry and energy, their impeccable credentials as citizens, their intelligence and cleanliness. But ask a Britoner on the street what objection they have to the Celestials, he wrote, and they will answer: Morals, sir, morals. Pagans, you know Pagans. No Mrs Chisholm at the Chinese Ports…no wives for the Pagans, sir, Prints, sir, improper Prints.
Without women to keep them on the straight and narrow, no wonder they wanted to look at dirty pictures. Or so the scaremongering tactics went. The panic reached fever pitch in 1856 when a prosperous high-class English-born prostitute called Sophia Lewis was found murdered in her bed, her neck slashed from ear to ear. Sophia was known to entertain rich Chinese merchants in her Little Bourke Street brothel; she spoke Cantonese and decorated her parlour with oriental ornaments. Two Chinese men were tracked to the Bendigo diggings and eventually tried and hanged for her murder—although there were many who doubted the competence of the police investigation.30
As the writer of ‘The Chinese Puzzle’ duly noted, the only argument against an otherwise intelligent, educated and industrious people was the absence of their wives. The rest was blind prejudice. We are afraid of the Chinese, and we have not the moral courage to say so, he wrote. Meanwhile, Mrs Chisholm is requested to smuggle us a few China women, and, by all means, to let those she brings be young. Failing that improbable event, the writer suggested another course of action. Miscegenation. Encouraging some of the pagans to unite themselves to more durable British spinsters and attaching themselves to the soil of Victoria was the crucial piece of the racial puzzle. The conundrum of division and prejudice would only be solved once the Chinese inter-married to found a new family upon the face of the earth.
The fate of the Chinese was sealed when the Gold Fields Commission, empowered to investigate the turbulence on the diggings in late 1854, handed down its final report in April 1855. It estimated that there were up to 3000 Chinese in Ballarat, 2000 in Bendigo, 1000 in Forest Creek and, most disturbingly, 1400 landed in Melbourne in the month of February 1855. The question of the influx of such large numbers of a pagan and inferior race is a very serious one, judged the commission. Even if the Chinese were considered desirable colonists, they are unaccompanied by their wives and families, under which circumstances no immigration can prove of real advantage to any society. According to the commission’s report, the Chinese immigrants’ low scale of domestic comfort, incurable habit of gaming and absurd superstition were vicious tendencies that were degrading to the morale of a civilised white society. Victoria needed rational men, graced by a woman’s touch, to restore its presently deranged society to an even keel.
Within a few months of the Gold Fields Commission report, a law was passed charging the Chinese £10 per head to land in Victoria. They came in greater numbers than ever before, disembarking at Robe in South Australia and walking 400 kilometres overland to the diggings. The racialised poll tax was a gamble that never produced dividends for the Victorian Government. It was classic loss chasing; they should have learned by then.
Only one other minority group received as much private and public commentary as Aborigines and the Chinese. Jews. Remember the Californian digger who jibed that you knew the good old days had ended once the women and Jews arrived? In Victoria, the wisecrack never quite held up. Jewish miners were among the first on the fields, and their presence in Ballarat is indivisible from the establishment and progress of the Lucky City.
In 1851, there were 364 Jews in Victoria, two-thirds the number there were in New South Wales. The Victorian Census recorded 2903 Jews in 1861: 1857 males and 1046 females. Overall, the Jewish population of Australia trebled in the decade between 1851 and 1861, allowing Jewish congregations to become self-sufficient for the first time. While the Victorian Jewish community increased almost tenfold over this period, the New South Wales community did not quite double. By 1861, the Jewish population of Australia constituted 0.48 per cent of the total, a proportion that has not changed significantly since that time.31 Such was the impact of gold.
The Ballarat Hebrew Congregation was established in the dining room of the Clarendon Hotel in Lydiard Street South, just a stone’s throw from the Government Camp, on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) 11 October 1853.32 Henry Harris, who may have been a Cornish Jew, ran the Clarendon Hotel. Harris was also the first president of the Congregation.33 One of the founding members was Charles Dyte, a thirty-two-year-old Londoner five feet tall, with mercantile training. He arrived in Ballarat in August 1853 and wasted no time in setting up a prominent auction house.
Many gold rush Jews came from Britain and bore anglicised names such as Harris, Franks, Marks, Isaacs, Simons, Josephs, Davis and Moss. There was also a fair share of the more distinguishable Levys, Cohens and Lazaruses. Others came from the wider Jewish Diaspora, particularly Germany and parts of Eastern Europe. Annie Silberberg was born in Poland in 1836 and educated in Paris. She arrived in Victoria in August 1853 with her parents Golda and Jacques, and siblings Esther, Eva, Meyer and Isaac. Annie married Lewis Hollander at Melbourne’s Stephen Street synagogue in 1860, moved to Ballarat and bore sixteen children.
Rebecca Abrahams married Polish-born Alfred Isaacs in London in August 1853 and set out for Victoria soon after, arriving in 1854 on the Queen of the East. Her first son, Isaac, became Governor-General of Australia in 1934, after serving as a member of Australia’s first federal parliament, attorney general and Chief Justice of the High Court. Isaac Isaacs described his mother as an extraordinarily gifted woman with a phenomenal faculty of absorbing and retaining knowledge who personally supervised the education of each of her four living children. From 1859, the Isaacs family lived in the gold towns of Yackandandah and Beechworth.34
Though some Jews did actively mine for gold, they more commonly entered into business on the goldfields, rapidly assuming leading positions as auctioneers, storekeepers, hawkers, jewellers, tobacconists and publicans. (Alfred Isaacs was a tailor.) This follows the pattern of Jewish integration into other western communities; the Jews of Cornwall, for example, occupied the trades of silversmith, watchmaker, pawnbroker, merchant, pedlar, auctioneer and brokers, with women working as milliners, dressmakers and shopkeepers.35 The Jews of Victoria chased a new opportunity for enterprise and endeavour, but they did not break the pattern of previous migrations.
Unlike the Chinese, Ballarat’s Jews were quickly accepted as part of the vibrant, edgy, entrepreneurial flavour of the day. Being there at the genesis of a new local community, Jews were able to play leading roles in the establishment of institutions and civic ideas, rather than accommodating themselves to the scraps they were thrown by a chary host. London Jews, by contrast, had historically become pedlars and secondhand dealers because of a city ordinance prohibiting Jews entering the retail trades. Depending on the locality, similar restriction applied to the finance sector and the professions. In continental Europe the ghetto system established such occupational boundaries geographically. But in Australia, there was no such formal impediment to freedom of movement or trade.
Still, anti-Semitism was alive and well in the partisan prism of individual minds. Mrs Massey, in surveying the many nations assembled in Victoria, singled out a dark, Jewish-looking man for special comment. His black eyes, wrote Mrs Massey, showed more than shrewdness; it amounted to unpleasant cunning. She made no such remarks about the Egyptians, Syrians, Persians, Indians, Maoris and African-Americans whom she also encountered on Melbourne’s streets. Henry Mundy performed a stylised rendition of a visit to a jew’s shop in Collins Street: you vant a pair trousers…I sell sheep, very sheep, yo get nodding so sheep in anoder shop. Oddly, MELBOURNE PUNCH, which began publication in late 1855, ran a regular column called ‘Shylock’, which purported to expose Jewish converts to Christianity. It may have been a victory to convert the heathen Chinese, but successful evangelism in the Jewish community purportedly exposed the scheming duplicity of its members.
In October 1856, following the depiction of a German Jew as naturally criminal in Ballarat’s MINER AND WEEKLY STAR newspaper, Charles Dyte wrote a letter to the editor pointing out that Jews as Cosmopolitans [have] ever been esteemed as being most loyal, orderly and quiet. It is significant that Dyte felt enough confidence in his own social status to stand up and defend his people publicly. He had good reason to be assertive. Though he was less than five feet tall, Ikey Dyte was a big man on campus. He would go on to become the chairman of the Ballarat Mining Exchange, the chairman of the first borough council of East Ballarat and a Member of the Legislative Assembly from 1864 to 1871. Dyte would later be hailed for play[ing] his part manfully in the famous affair at Eureka.36
If the Chinese were tarnished for deliberately leaving their women behind as permanent grass widows, the Jews faced a different problem. An article appearing in the LONDON JEWISH CHRONICLE in August 1852 summed up the challenge:
The recent discoveries of gold have tempted many young men to leave the land of their birth and depart in pursuit of fortune. Among their ranks the young Hebrew has gone also to seek an independence by frugal habits, industrious pursuits, and the sweat of his brow…the steady-going English Jew will not expect to build up a fortune with such rapidity… yet, by reason of the fast increasing population of the gold colonies, he will see the acquisition of gain must of necessity become a work of time. Such being the true state of the case, the young Jewish emigrant will find that after he has become settled…the social and domestic feeling, inherited from his ancestors, will make him find that he requires affection; that he wants a home; that he craves a gentle partner, who by her assiduous love and sweetness may lighten his labour.37
So, the Jewish immigrant supposedly played his game according to reason, not chance. But he was, nonetheless, a man of emotion. His independence was not predicated on fleeing the cloying constraints of domesticity. Rather, he coveted a home of love and sweetness as just reward for industry. But where would he find such a homemaker, when there were so few Jewish girls in Australia? The CHRONICLE had a solution. It called for English rabbis to preach female emigration from the pulpit, unless in the interim a Mrs Chisholm rises up out of Israel. This was the only thing that would save many a young man from marrying a Christian. The rallying cry was heard, apparently, and by August 1853 none other than the real Caroline Chisholm came to the rescue. With the Jewish Ladies Benevolent Society of London, she corralled a contingent of twenty ready and willing single Jewish women. The precious cargo sailed on the newly built Caroline Chisholm, along with other Jewish families immigrating to Australia. The spectre of intermarriage was averted—for a time at least. Two generations on, few of the grandchildren of the gold rush Jews still identified themselves as Jewish.38
Robert Caldwell predicted that Victoria would provide the peaceful gathering place for all nations. But plenty of others mapped a social geography of division and distinction. Jews and other minority religious groups were not eligible for public aid to establish denominational schools. In 1854, there was a growing movement for a change to the relevant act of parliament, but William Westgarth favoured abolishing aid altogether and returning to pure user-pays. This, he argued, would be the only truly non-discriminatory practice, if Victoria were to live up to its reputation of political and social inclusiveness. Colonial liberality was a tetchy beast; it relied on visionary leaders to give constitutional rights their cultural claws. To dream of excluding a Jew from the colonial parliament would be as foreign to the law as to the public sentiment, wrote Westgarth in 1858, the same year that the Melbourne Club moved out of John Pascoe Fawkner’s pub and into its purpose-built citadel in Collins Street. Jews were customarily barred from the elite gentlemen’s club, and women were officially disqualified.
William Westgarth noted that there was a sprinkling of all the nations of the earth on the Ballarat goldfields—he estimated that ten per cent of the population was foreign—but each tended to stick to its own turf. In particular, he pointed out a locality thirty metres distant from any other tents that was inhabited by several hundred Frenchmen. Raffaello Carboni, an Italian, noted that the English, Germans and Scots diggers of Ballarat worked generally on the Gravel Pits, while the Irish had their stronghold on the Eureka. The Americans, he tells us in typically idiosyncratic fashion, fraternised with all the wide-awake, ubi caro, ibi vultures. The Latin translates roughly as ‘where there is flesh, there are vultures’.
This aphorism neatly sums up the suspicion and wariness with which many British immigrants viewed the large contingent of Americans on the goldfields. Thomas Pierson, the Philadelphia freemason, noted a general prejudice against Americans, which he put down to envy of their superiority in all things. Westgarth, on the other hand, noted the American belief in self-adjustment rather than government regulation; their trust in human nature over vested authority. People accustomed to self-government, these commentators worried, were bound to clash with people accustomed to the rule of law. We have no sympathy with mob law in the Queen’s dominions, said Henry Mundy ruefully. The mob was such an unruly, unpredictable ogre precisely because it was constituted by such a diverse range of human beings, all with their own codes, superstitions, values, resentments, methods of wish-fulfilment and personal histories of loss, shame and frustration.
A conciliation of such diverse pretensions and interests, realised the Swiss miner Charles Eberle, will not be achieved without conflict.