THE WINTER OF THEIR DISCONTENT
It was to be a winter of untold discontent.
By June, plummeting temperatures amplified the cruelty of the past weeks’ driving rain. With the benefit of modern meteorology, we now know that the mercury dips lower in Ballarat than just about anywhere else in Victoria outside the Alpine regions. It is only 115 kilometres from metropolitan Melbourne, only 435 metres above sea level, yet it has a mean (very mean) winter maximum temperature of 10.7 degrees Celsius. And then there’s the cunning wind chill factor: a southwesterly draught of cold discomfort blowing down off the escarpment. No one was immune from the surly blast. Those perched up in the Camp and those nestled down on the Flat all shivered in their tents, imagining what family and friends at home were doing in the northern summer sunshine.
Jones’ Circus might have been emblematic of gold rush illusions, but its tent was exceptional for its size and solidity. It was like a citadel compared with the simple pitched-roof tents of most miners and shopkeepers and their families. Many diggers slept on the bare ground, noted Thomas McCombie, with a canvas fly for protection from the rain and wind. According to McCombie, a great number of single men lived under the eucalypt branches they made into miams or wigwams. Frances Pierson, on the other hand, had made a cosy tent home for herself, Thomas and Mason. She had transported feather beds, bedsteads and a mountain of covers to the diggings. The Piersons had been warned that you could use as many blankets in Ballarat on a spring or autumn night as you would in a frozen American winter. Thomas was thankful for the advice, and felt nothing but sympathy for the 99 out of 100 people who had but two blankets to sleep on under and over. Those who were lucky enough to tap a vein that winter went straight to the waiting Wathaurung and bought a possum skin cloak.
Charles Evans, never one to whinge, was compelled to note the frigid conditions. He woke each morning half perished with cold and was amazed to find ice crusting the drinking water in his buckets. Once that was thawed, mobility provided the next test of physical and mental endurance. To pass from one part of the diggings to another, wrote the Ballarat correspondent to the GEELONG ADVERTISER,
requires the combined characteristics of a water rat and a steam engine; for when the gullies and flats are not actually covered with water, they are so deep with mud as to require more than ordinary strength to make across them in safety.1
Thomas Pierson, who seemed never to stop whingeing, recorded in his diary that 25 June 1854 was the grimmest day since his family of three had arrived eighteen months ago. A strong, damp wind and cold as could be without freezing, wrote Thomas. He had just cause for his crabbiness. Incessant rains, Police Magistrate John D’Ewes later recalled of Ballarat’s winter of ’54, a raw cold atmosphere and unfathomable mud.
The fair-weather campers left. Forty-four-year-old Ellen Young, ensconced on Golden Point since the spring of 1852, burrowed in for another cold season. She burned what wood she and her husband Frederick could cut and carry back from Black Hill. Woodcutting was a daily chore now that they were committing it in such large quantities to the sod chimney built into the rear of their tent. And it was harder to come by than when the Youngs first arrived on the fields. So many more people, and still arriving daily, fresh off the boats, despite the ugly conditions and dire predictions that Ballarat had lost its golden sheen. But the Youngs’ labour was made bearable by the remarkable fact that timber collection was an entitlement of Frederick’s mining licence. This, thought Ellen, was an enlightened idea of the commons. It was just a shame the monthly renewal fee was so high, and the penalty for non-compliance so harsh. Ellen could see the frightened, dejected look in the eyes of the men who had to choose between the thirty shillings for a valid licence (and lawful timber collection) and a loaf for their hungry children.
And this winter, Ellen was bound to concede, the whole town appeared out of sorts. Fragmented. Undone. Still manically busy, but with a haunted feeling about it. Yes, by mid-1854 everything seemed out of joint, as one journalist put it.2 Even Mother Nature appeared to have turned the tables. The rainy season was supposed to be the harvest of diggers, as James Bonwick had said in the April 1853 edition of the GOLD DIGGERS MONTHLY MAGAZINE, furnishing plenty of the water you needed for puddling and washing. But by 1854 that wasn’t the sort of operation most miners were undertaking. It was all deep lead sinking now, great long shafts yawning into the ground, and the water was a terrible menace. More than that, every miner, and every miner’s poor anxious wife, knew the water could be deadly. A shaft could fill with water faster than you could say Joe, loosening the timbers that held back the great weight of earth, engorging the hole, ruining months of backbreaking labour. Or worse, drowning the poor wretch whose turn it was to bucket. If eight men were in the digging party and each of those men had three children, that was two dozen bairns who would go hungry. Hence the endless bucketing, day and night, night and day, to keep the shafts clear.
Water was supposed to be the key, not the lock. The water, after all, wrote Bonwick, is the true philosopher’s stone; for by its touch the gold is brought to view. But Ellen Young was a perceptive woman, as well as an educated one, and she knew if there was a real alchemical substance, an elixir of life that could turn base survival into blissful perfection, it was not water or gold, but bread.
Ellen Young is the closest thing Australia has to a Madame de Staël. Like the literary matriarch of the French Revolution, Ellen was a woman of keen intellect who used the power of her pen to rally popular forces in a period of upheaval. Her influence was local, not international like de Staël’s, yet she played a crucial role in an event that has come to hold national significance as a key political turning point.
Ellen Francis Warboys was born in Hampshire in 1810. In 1837, she married Frederick Young, probably in St James Anglican Church on the Clerkenwell Green. At twenty-seven, Ellen was two years older than her new husband, who was a chemist by trade. We know little about the Youngs’ early life together, beyond their marriage in Clerkenwell. This was an area of central London famous for its long association with radicalism, from the anticlerical Lollards of the English Reformation to the mid-nineteenth-century Chartists—and beyond, to the Marxists of the early twentieth century. (We can possibly infer from their choice of parish church that the Youngs were politically progressive, as we might deduce about someone who lives in Newtown or Fitzroy in modern Australia.)
Census data for 1841 shows Ellen and Frederick living in Shoreditch, another central London location, where an extensive network of Warboys kin also resided. The Youngs lived with Frederick’s mother and sister. Frederick arrived in Victoria on 3 April 1851, prior to the discovery of gold, and Ellen followed two years later, debarking at Geelong on 11 July 1853. The reunited couple travelled in February 1854 to Ballarat, where Frederick became a digger. Many years later he returned to his vocation as a chemist and became the first mayor of Ballarat East.
Ellen was a prolific poet who transcribed her lifetime’s works (she wrote the first poem aged thirteen) into a 175-page hardbound volume with marbled endpapers in May 1870, two years before her death in Ballarat at the age of sixty-two. The book was donated to the Ballarat Library in 1911 and remains there today, in excellent condition, neither treasured nor forgotten.
The body of work reveals many things: Ellen was classically tutored in literature, history and theology; she was pious, fashionably hyper-sentimental and proud of her English heritage; she was deeply in love with her husband, whom she variously refers to as my lover or my mentor. She was passionately connected to both the inner world of the heart and the exterior world of public affairs. And she once had a beloved son named Arthur. In the volume’s first poem, ‘Smiles and Tears’, Ellen writes: My heart oppress’d, smoking with grief/For pleasing Poesy sought relief. An Arthur Young died in St Pancras, just round the corner from Clerkenwell, in 1850. Like digger on his long rough road/I cannot cast my useless load, wrote Ellen many years later. It seems Ellen put an ocean between herself and her misfortune, but could never escape this anguish.3
Ellen Young’s earliest published poem appeared in the GEELONG ADVERTISER on the first day of the winter of 1854. She had written it the previous week, caught in the maelstrom of a flood. At the height of the storm, Ellen later recalled, she secured her mattress from danger and then her spleen evaporated into her first truly political poem. Published as ‘Ballarat’ (but transcribed into her volume as ‘A Digger’s Lament’), the poem is a sixteen-stanza commentary on the miserable living conditions and depressed emotions of a community crushed under the weight of high expectations and disappointment. It begins ominously:
If you’ve not been to Ballarat
Then stay away from there;
I would not have my worst foe’s cat
To have such sorry fare.
Ellen described the poor state of the roads, the lack of fresh food, the famine prices, the infinite mud, the futility of complaining to the resident commissioners, the apocryphal gold and the burdensome memories of times and places past. She was trapped, they were all trapped, caught between the distant rock of ‘home’ and a hard place of ceaseless toil. The gold I promised still is hid; The past is all a sham, wrote Ellen of the dark corner of hopelessness into which the diggers were wedged. (Raffaello Carboni would later come up with his own version of this truth, much quoted by historians since. This Ballarat, he wrote, a Nugety Eldorado for the few, a ruinous field of hard labour for many, a profound ditch of Perdition for Body and Soul to all.) There they are, ’mid crowds from many climes (said Ellen), bogged in a culvert, stuck in a rut, the wheels desperately spinning.
Mid-stream, Ellen’s ‘Ballarat’ begins to take on a more righteous air, throwing off the soppiness of mem’ries craved and how her heart heaves in her breast. It’s indignation she summons now, taking offence at the insult of the situation:
The floods were out, the mail-man drunk,
What matter the delay?
That though the hearts of many sunk—
They’re diggers! Who are they?…
They’re men—high tax’d, ill log’d, worse fed
Of strong and stalwart frame
Better was ne’er by hero led
Or earn’d a hero’s name.
Suddenly, Ellen has introduced a new element into public discourse about the diggings. A sense of grievance. An air of affront. A polarising of the forces of good and evil through the positioning of heroes against villains.
It was a position that would increasingly be taken up by other organs of public opinion in the spring of ’54. The GEELONG ADVERTISER did not begin to echo Ellen’s sentiments until 27 September, when it represented the diggers as hard-working, taxed, unrepresented members of the body politic, hamstrung by absurd, insulting regulations. Ellen Young was at the crest of an inexorable wave of grievance. Or perhaps, to use another watery metaphor, she had unplugged the dyke that held back public fury.
Forty-four years old, Ellen was a senior citizen, a community elder. All of the leaders who would later emerge in the popular uprising were younger: in 1854, Peter Lalor was twenty-seven, Raffaello Carboni—the acclaimed scribe of Eureka, whose work did not appear until December 1855—was thirty-seven, and John Basson Humffray, who would later sit in parliament with Lalor, was thirty. Timothy Hayes, Anastasia’s husband, was thirty-four. Like the counter-culture revolution of more than a century later, the mounting wave of protest on the Ballarat diggings was a youth movement.4
In Ballarat, Ellen adopted the tone of a civic Mother Lion, defending the integrity of her valiant cubs. No one disputed her authority or right to become the mouthpiece for the people of Ballarat. In fact she was actively encouraged by Henry Seekamp, the twenty-five-year-old editor of the new BALLARAT TIMES, which first went to print in March 1854. Henry published Ellen’s increasingly political poems and strident letters to the editor in the spring of 1854. Unlike later Australian female writers with a critical edge and a finger on the public pulse, Ellen didn’t write anonymously.5 Rather, she flamboyantly ruffled her feathers and published as Ellen F Young, the Ballarat Poetess.6
Henry Seekamp may have been encouraged to publish Ellen’s work by his common-law wife, Clara Du Val Seekamp, who was herself something of a firebrand. As we have seen, Irish-born Clara arrived in Victoria in May 1853 on the Marco Polo, with two of her three young children. By early 1854 she had hooked up with German-born Henry Seekamp, ten years her junior, and taken his name, though there is no record of their marriage. It appears to have been a meeting of minds between Clara and the passionate young journalist. Years later she said of her young husband: if he’s sinned, it was with the single-minded aim of bettering the people.7
The BALLARAT TIMES—a voice for the beleaguered people—was run out of the Seekamps’ home on Bakery Hill. It was a financial success: within a year the Seekamps would buy all the land surrounding their little timber shack, including the houses and tents upon it, to establish a veritable compound. One house was used for the printing office, and there was a separate residence, a kitchen, a coach house, stables and a detached office. Though the relationship would not be as successful as the business enterprise, Clara would defend her (estranged) husband’s role in Ballarat’s history for the rest of her long life. She had good reason to perpetuate the BALLARAT TIMES’s legacy. By New Year’s Day 1855, she would be its editor.
In the winter of 1854, a profound movement of communal disaffection mushroomed in the damp, putrid fields of Ballarat. Under Ellen Young’s matriarchal tutelage, distrust of authority and collective grievance started to generate broader political debate about the big-ticket items of poverty, land reform, health and economic management—not to mention the whole damned notion of British justice.
Chief among the complaints of the goldfields polity was poverty: crushing, irrefutable, seemingly irredeemable poverty. Thomas Pierson wrote that in Ballarat he had seen examples of great wealth but few other places could produce the same amount of destitution poverty and want. Thomas Mundy, who carted illegal alcohol to the diggings rather than dig himself, saw it every day. People arrived at the goldfields with a few shillings or no money at all. They pitched their eight foot by six calico tent thinking to pick up gold as soon as they land. The result for forty-nine out of fifty of them? What privations the most of them had to go through, Mundy wrote, hard living, hard lodging, bad drinking water [which] often brings on Colonial fever or dysentery. Average weekly earnings on the Ballarat goldfield in 1854 were £1-13-9 (not quite thirty-four shillings). When a bag of flour cost £14, a loaf of bread 4 shillings, rice 1s per pound, sugar 9s, butter 4s, and brandy or gin 8s per pint—not to mention the monthly licence fee of 30s—there was clearly no fat (or fibre) in a family’s weekly rations.8
Jane McCracken wrote home to her mother that for every family that did well in the colony, two or three did not. I have felt more truly sorry for people here than ever I did at home, confessed Jane. Poverty has always been a women’s issue. In the French uprising of 1871, wrote historian Edith Thomas, les petroleuses, the incendiary women, literally torched Paris in rage and despair at their devastating penury and the exorbitant price of bread.
Jane McCracken’s personal sympathy highlights another problem: the lack of help for those in need. No one seems to care for the poor immigrant, good or bad, body or soul, echoed Crown Land Commissioner C. Rudston Read. The goldfields were still a frontier: no hospitals, no benevolent institutions funded by the state or friendly societies. Everything was still too new and raw and mobile and undone for that. There was not even an almshouse. Martha Clendinning would help establish the Ballarat Female Refuge in 1867, but in 1854, welfare was a matter of individual goodwill extended by kin if you had any, friends if you had made some or shipmates if you could track them down.
In this unfinished part of the world, wrote twenty-two-year-old Noah Dalway in a letter home to his mother in Ireland, it is now that I feel the loss of you all and of a home where, had I been what was required of a son, I might now be happy in that home without any care anxiety or laborious work, all of which are now my only companions.9 Wasn’t the El Dorado of the South meant to put an end to care, anxiety and unrewarding toil? This Australia, dear mother, is most falsely represented, Noah declared in 1854, after months on the goldfields. So many thousands, what are they doing, barely making a living. According to Noah, only men of capital who could start their own line of business had any guarantee of raising themselves out of destitution. I often grieve, he said, to think that I have not as much as a £5 note to call my own and to send you some.
Harry Hastings Pearce’s grandmother lived on the Creswick Creek diggings, twenty miles from Ballarat, in the 1850s. Later she would tell her family that the number one cause of all the trouble in the summer of ’54 was poverty. William Howitt reckoned that the diggers were primarily aggrieved by false accounts of the richness of the diggings and the ease of procuring gold, followed closely by the exorbitant price of food. But the arbitrary nature of gold mining, and Ballarat’s particular palaeo-geology, meant that not everyone was starving. A quick glance at the advertisements in the BALLARAT TIMES would still show that while some families couldn’t afford bread, others were dining on potted pheasant and imported jellies. If my neighbour could eat like a king, why not I?
Those who made their fortunes often packed their bags and went home triumphant. But for the majority who had failed, there was not even enough loose change for a coach ride to Geelong, let alone a passage to Britain. To many, there seemed an obvious solution. If gold digging was so futile, why not farm the millions of acres of Crown land that surrounded the goldfields? Till the virgin soil. On the land, people imagined, there could be an end to the restless pursuit of fortune and an acceptance of a modest livelihood of rural toil. It’s where many immigrants had started their journeys, after all.
The idea was especially attractive to family men, who longed for a home base where they could leave their wives and children while they continued to follow the rushes, chasing new leads to golden success. Gypsy life was initially fun and adventurous, but uprooting a large family time and time again became tiresome and humiliating. Set up on a farm, the missus could grow a garden and feed the kids wholesome food; perhaps even send them to school. It was not just the starving diggers who envisaged this redemptive possibility. Prosperous diggers who felt an affinity with the Australian landscape and social outlook (not to mention the speculative potential of all that fertile pasture) also fancied themselves as landed gentlemen. For this emergent middle class, access to land was not about subsistence but accelerating social status. Here was the yeoman ideal of independence and mastery combined with the launching pad to upward mobility of a land boom.
There was one big hitch. 1n 1851, when the Port Phillip District was granted political separation from New South Wales, the new colony was divided into about one thousand unfenced and unsurveyed sheep runs. The squatters who controlled these runs produced the wool that accounted for more than ninety per cent of Victoria’s exports. Only some 400,000 acres had been sold—in the towns of Melbourne, Geelong and Portland and in the ‘settled’ areas near them, tiny agricultural outposts such as Bacchus Marsh and Kilmore.10 The ‘land question’ was both ‘bewilderingly complex’, as Geoffrey Serle has ably demonstrated, and crystal clear. Through a tangled legal web of long leases and pre-emptive buying rights to the squatters—many of whom sat in the Legislative Council—the lands were effectively ‘locked’. The land question was an A-grade political battleground, contested by urban radicals, cautious moderates and extremist aristocrats alike. And this was before the land-hungry gold rush immigrants began clamouring for a piece of the pie.
In late 1852, Governor La Trobe began making promises that town allotments and agricultural plots near the diggings would be sold. A deputation representing the wishes of over seven thousand people, recruited in part by James Bonwick, had convinced him that the bulk of the working population and most of the married men wish to become landholders. La Trobe made good his pledge, and for eighteen months from early 1853 more than half a million acres were sold. But there was another snag: as squatters and wealthy speculators outbid each other to gobble up the new allotments, the price of land skyrocketed. In 1850 the average price of rural land was 25s per acre. By 1853 the price had more than trebled, to £4. The immigrant married men and workers who thought to exchange shovel for scythe had been dudded. It didn’t help matters that much of the land sold around the goldfields was bought by employees of the government camps—the gold commissioners, police inspectors and magistrates—with money borrowed from prosperous local publicans and merchants. James Johnston, Margaret’s Jamie, on a salary of £400 a year, started buying up land almost as soon as the two of them arrived in Ballarat in the winter of 1854.
The capitalist land-grabbers did nothing to improve the lands, let alone cultivate them, so there was still no agricultural produce flowing to the goldfields, and diggers were no closer to their pastoral idylls. Food prices remained high, especially in winter when the roads became impassable. Unskilled workers could find no alternative employment at a time when public expenditure on roads, docks or other infrastructure was negligible. Thus most miners, concluded Harry Hastings Pearce via his grandmother’s tales, were condemned to the hopeless search for gold.
Land reform. The concept became a pernicious irritant precisely because it was also a palpable remedy. Three little words formed a potent mantra. Unlock the lands. Unlock the lands! UNLOCK THE LANDS. Public debate was on the side of the diggers, and even conservative merchants like Robert Caldwell, who was still touting the myth that there was no such thing as poverty in Australia, advocated land reform as an antidote to intemperance. Cannot the government come into competition with the publican, and, instead of presenting the means of a debauch, put before the eyes of the returned digger a sweet little corner of fifty acres, he wrote. How many a wife longs for this bait to be hung out!
Certain diggers agreed. Locked lands meant spare money was spent in pubs rather than on homesteads. American Seth Rudolphus Clark thought it was sheer bad management on the part of the government…to encourage low dissipation and drunkenness when family farms might be built, and fruit and vegetables grown. Creating a means for miners to buy small plots of agricultural land had long been the subject of anxious attention, as one goldfields official put it, but the issue increased in urgency as the proportion of women and children on the diggings increased.11 This fundamental shift from pure industry to entrenched domesticity had reached its undeniable zenith by the winter of 1854.
It’s not that there wasn’t a record of disaffection before Ellen Young arrived on the scene. In February 1854 two English Chartists, George Black and H. R. Nicholls, began publishing the GOLD DIGGER’S ADVOCATE from their HQ in Melbourne. The ADVOCATE drew on arguments and emotions that had been in circulation at least since the Bendigo anti-licence protests of mid-1853. Its self-proclaimed charter was to please all true lovers of liberty of conscience and freedom of action. (At one shilling and sixpence it was more expensive, as well as more political, than Bonwick’s journal and lasted about as long; the ADVOCATE folded in September 1854.) Like Chartist newspapers in England, the ADVOCATE advanced a number of causes with a broadly democratic agenda. It argued for an amendment to Victoria’s Constitution to extend electoral representation to (male) diggers, and railed against the petty tyranny of the goldfields officials over the disenfranchised diggers. The ADVOCATE commented at an urban remove for all diggers on all diggings. It predicted dire consequences if the diggers were forced to submit to political slavery.
What Ellen Young did was different. Ellen spoke for the people, as one of the people, about what it was like to be among the people. Her husband was a digger. She was a digger’s wife who had decided to toil with a pen instead of a pick. But this was no drawing room dirge: there was no drawing room, just a leaky tent. Ellen, you could say, was an early fan of the notion that the personal is political; that personal grievance can and should amount to political utterance.
Given her association with Clerkenwell and the sophisticated references to democratic traditions in her poetry and letters, she may well have been an activist in Chartist struggles in England, the popular democratic movement that drew in many radicalised women, particularly in the early 1840s. Certainly, Ellen’s poetry bears all the hallmarks of classic Chartist melodrama: a redemptive narrative based around a golden age of autonomy, present misery and oppression, an enemy outsider, liberation by heroic Chartist manhood, and a radiant future based on citizenship, chivalry and domestic harmony.12 Ellen may even have come to Victoria with hopes of fulfilling the early Chartist promise of political equality for men and women, a platform that by the 1850s had been pragmatically dumped in favour of manhood suffrage, perceived as a more achievable goal.
Ellen would have found like minds in some of the other women steeped in Chartist heritage who also found their way to Ballarat. Twenty-nine-year-old Cornish-born Jane Cuming (née Sweet) arrived in Victoria in 1852 with her husband Stephen and their first two children. The Cumings were deeply influenced by Chartist and liberal philosophy. Their daughter Martineau, born in the revolutionary year of 1848, was named after the English feminist writer, political economist and abolitionist Harriet Martineau. Jane Fryer was another active Chartist who went to Ballarat with her husband in 1854. At twenty-two years old, Jane was buzzing with the reformist zeal of the young. She was one of the first to marry in a British registry office, eschewing a church wedding in favour of what she saw as the more equitable vows of a civil ceremony. Jane went on to become a prominent socialist, co-founding the Australian Secular Society and working tirelessly for the Eight Hour Movement, the women’s suffrage movement and anti-conscription and peace campaigns.
Ballarat was overflowing with budding political radicals and religious nonconformists in the winter of ’54. Hunched over in their tents, warmed by brandy and outrage as they watched their children sleep, couples like the Cumings and the Fryers applied careworn dreams of liberty and justice to their beleaguered lot. Victoria promised a tabula rasa for their utopian visions.
Ellen Young spoke directly to these people. In her poem ‘Ballarat’, she offered an explanation for her protesting the plight of the diggers. Emblem of hope the poets sing, she writes, And I’ve the fancy caught. She makes it sound almost light-hearted—impulsive—but as Ellen would have known, a form of ‘militant domesticity’ was part of the Chartist tradition, with some women writing themselves into the melodramatic narrative as crusading heroines. They were champions for the right to suitable housing, decent food and companionable marriages. Such crusaders argued the need for women to be independent, not subservient to men, slaves to neither the workhouse nor their husband’s dominion. Educated women from Britain to France to Germany took a leading role in the revolutionary movements that swept across Europe in 1848, raising awareness that the struggle for political sex equality was also an economic and social struggle for a better standard of living for working people.13 Participatory democracy started at home.
There was also home-grown Australian precedent for the political evangelism of Ellen Young’s poetry. Adelaide Ironside is best known as the first Australian woman artist to study overseas; however, she also did a smashing line in political poetry and published at least twenty of her fiery, patriotic poems in the pro-republican PEOPLE’S ADVOCATE in 1853 and 1854. Other members of the Australian League, the circle of young radicals in which she moved, encouraged Adelaide in her actions. It’s quite feasible that copies of the PEOPLE’S ADVOCATE were in circulation on the Ballarat goldfields. George Lang, the twenty-two-year-old son of the group’s spiritual leader, Reverend John Dunmore Lang, was in Ballarat in 1854. He was working as the manager of the local branch of the Bank of New South Wales and also wrote for the BALLARAT TIMES. Adelaide had worked as a governess to the younger Lang children and George would have known her. He may even have drawn attention to Adelaide’s rousing poems; possibly he encouraged Henry Seekamp, who shared Lang’s republican fervour, to publish Ellen Young’s work. Seekamp was certainly prepared to accord Ellen a prominent space in which to forge her own identity as an intellectual leader in the local struggle for democratic reform.
Together, Ellen Young and Henry Seekamp became the mouthpiece for the people of Ballarat in late 1854. He was the hothead; she was the calm but deadly serious moral conscience of the community. Good cop, bad cop: tag-team political advocacy.
Ellen’s cadence was remarkably upbeat in early months of that glacial winter. She saw reason for hope. She rallied the flagging troops. Her optimism was pinned on the new governor, due to arrive in Victoria at any moment. She published a new poem in the GEELONG ADVERTISER on 1 June 1854:
For much I hope a change is near;
New brooms, they say, sweep clean;
We soon shall have Sir Hotham here,
He’ll make a change, I ween.14
Ellen felt her literary role was to raise the spirits, to find a way out of the emotional morass that had settled upon Ballarat’s diggers like a moorland fog. She employed homespun images—cats, brooms, fancies—to convey ideas of historically mutinous significance. She entreated the diggers to each one join in joyous song/The song of liberty.15 She wished good luck to every man. She blessed the Queen, our Queen, and all who nobly toil. In the last line of the poem she added an unconventional but apposite flourish: God bless their babes and wives. Ellen’s words were intended to unify: to strengthen the bonds of a collective spirit in crisis. To find a common enemy.
The diggers may not have had a representative in parliament, but they had a free press and a maverick poet to call their own.
British and Justice were the two words on everyone’s lips in the winter of 1854. The words generally carried a question mark. This? You call this British justice? There were many ways to illustrate the hypocrisy. Thomas Mundy winced every time he saw the soldiers pass by. It wasn’t because he was afraid they’d find the illegal alcohol stashed in his cart (he knew sly grog was tacitly approved) but because of the aristocratic pretensions of lords and duke’s sons, friends of La Trobe, mincing around with their gold epaulettes and lace on their coats who knew nothing of the people or the country. The indignity of educated professional men being lorded over by a pack of exiled nincompoops stuck in Mundy’s craw, and he knew he wasn’t alone. Things will not remain long as they are, he predicted. The British are a loyal law abiding people but they expect, what they have been accustomed to, British justice.
English journalist William Howitt also noticed how incensed the diggers were by heavy-handed, arrogant treatment from the police. The arbitrary, Russian sort of way in which they were visited by the authorities, he wrote, was especially galling for gentlemen. Weren’t the British at the very moment fighting a war against the Czar in the Crimea for failing to honour enlightened standards of diplomacy?
Examples of injustice and incivility occurred day after day, burgeoning on the grapevine of community outrage. Prisoners could be left manacled to tree logs if the tiny lockup was full or if the turnkey took a set against them. Honest but poor licence defaulters were chained together with hardened thieves and assorted ex-cons from Van Diemen’s Land. Women were incarcerated with men, nothing but a flimsy partition between them. Other inmates were forced to draw water and hew wood for the camp. After a sick man died in the Ballarat lockup because there was no hospital in which to receive proper care, Thomas Pierson cried Oh! How humane is Brittish [sic] law and Brittish freedom. Since he was an American, Pierson’s lament took on an even more divisive bent. His condemnation of seemingly local offences spiralled out into critique of transnational significance. Thomas and Frances went to the Ballarat Magistrates Court one Saturday morning and witnessed several licence cases. One man had borrowed another’s licence. He was gaoled for two months in Geelong. A still more heathenish part of the matter, Thomas later reflected in his diary, is that the man had a wife and six children in his tent in Ballarat. The poor woman had just been confined with the sixth. The English conduct in governing is a disgrace to any civilised nation, concluded Thomas. Government oppression and negligence were beginning to be a factor in the struggle for survival. Another word was added to the lexicon of complaint: tyranny.
Ballarat society was mired in complaint. To add to the administrative quagmire, Ballarat was dealing with a new top dog. Robert Rede was appointed resident commissioner of the Ballarat goldfields on the eve of the winter deluge. Whether he was sent as a punishment or a peace offering is unclear. English-born Rede was the son of a Royal Navy man, but pursued a career in medicine before tossing in his studies and sailing to Victoria in November 1851. He soon entered the public service and, with his excitable nature, quickly came to the attention of the Gold Fields Commission. Promoted to resident commissioner on a salary of £700 a year plus accommodation and rations, the thirty-nine-year-old bachelor immediately realised the Eureka diggings was the place to be. At Eureka more activity is to be seen at present both amongst Miners and Storekeepers than on any other portion of these Fields, Rede’s benign predecessor reported to his superiors in the Melbourne HQ of the commission. It now forms the most important section and contains a larger population than anywhere else. In the first of his weekly reports, Robert Rede described Eureka as the most populated and unruly part of the district.16 His reports tend to be loquacious and colourful, perhaps the better to show up his immediate junior, James Johnston, whom the colonial secretary had previously dressed down for being very curt with his reports, so deficient in information that he might as well have sent none. (The colonial secretary expected Johnston to be more communicative in future, but Rede took over the filing of weekly returns altogether.17) Rede used his reports to give an appearance of peace and order at his new post. When a prisoner was rescued from the lockup by his mates, Rede reported the incident but assured HQ the incident arose from drink and not from any ill feeling against the authorities. Johnston had probably been smart. Sometimes no news is the best news.
Some members of the goldfields administration could see that the subterranean civic impulses would not be kept down. On 3 July 1854, magistrate John D’Ewes wrote to the colonial secretary in Melbourne to warn about the lack of basic services available to the diggers and townsfolk at Ballarat:
The painful impossibility that at present exists of affording relief to sick aging and destitute persons here at this inclement season of the year, and of which I am sorry to say a large number exists in this daily increasing population, owing to the nonexistence of any hospital or asylum, except the small one belonging to the Camp and restricted to Government servants.
The people were taking matters into their own hands, he reported. A meeting at the Ballarat Hotel on 1 July took subscriptions for a new hospital. The well know liberality of the diggers when it came to public subscriptions meant that £270 was donated by twenty-four persons that night. D’Ewes thought it ill-judged for the government not to be seen to be contributing in some way to this fund. He came up with the canny idea of auctioning confiscated sly grog and donating the proceeds to the hospital, instead of ‘destroying’ the cache, a thinly veiled euphemism for handing it out to police. While Ellen Young was rallying the forces of cohesion among the diggers, D’Ewes was trying to ameliorate the toxic sense of ‘us and them’ that was ever creeping into the Ballarat populace.
Destitution, lack of access to land and inadequate public services made a formidable backdrop, but the focal point of daily complaints was the method of checking licences. Nothing, wrote William Howitt, could exceed the avidity, the rigidity and arbitrary spirit with which the licence fees were enforced on the diggings. The police, charged with the task of enforcing compliance with the monthly renewal process, were uniformly despised. If the military presence was made up of the simpering sons of insolvent gentry, the police were drawn largely from the flotsam of ex-Vandemonians and other layabouts.
The Victorian Government paid peanuts and got the inevitable monkeys. The police force was young, ill trained, inexperienced and frequently shickered. A more proud, lazy, ignorant, tyrannical set of vagabonds could not easily be found, was Thomas Pierson’s summation of the ‘traps’ who gave Frances ‘a call’ in her store on St Patrick’s Day, a sure sign she was selling sly grog.
The Ballarat community expressed outrage that their licence fees were used to support a police force that did nothing to check crime, but was more likely to be embroiled in corruption. Storekeepers who sold grog paid the police. (Frances Pierson didn’t sustain a conviction, so she may have been one of the many paying hush money.) Meanwhile, many miners disappeared down shafts in the black of night, either through mishap or misdeed, never to be seen again. Claim jumping was rife, and more often sorted out by fists and bowie knives than police investigation and arbitration. If a policeman deigned to turn up when a digger was killed in a mining accident, reported Thomas Mundy, Yes he would say he’s dead right enough before thrusting his hand into the dead man’s pocket and extracting what money or valuables he had. Chained dogs and pistols under pillows were the preferred means of safeguarding against crime. No one had a shred of confidence in Victoria’s finest.
The arbitrary and heavy-handed method of licence hunting was intimately connected in the hearts and minds of the more educated, politicised diggers with the affront of destitution. Very few like to have their poverty exposed, assessed the GEELONG ADVERTISER. Public disclosure was precisely what the practice of indiscriminate licence checking achieved: the licence law makes poverty a crime. Exposure led to imprisonment, which turned a loyal subject into a broken-spirited man. The crowning insult was for an unlicensed digger to be arrested in front of his wife and children and dragged away at the point of a bayonet. James Johnston was singled out by the Ballarat correspondent to the GEELONG ADVERTISER as being on a crusade against unlicensed miners, a mission that exceeded the limits of his office. Margaret Brown Howden could have no idea how profoundly her dear Jamie was despised in her new home town.
Foremost among the howling gale of protest against the authorities was that the police lorded it over a population that was more highly educated and civilised than the supposed guardians of decency and order. Beardless boys just pitched-forked into assistant commissionerships, wrote digger John Bastin, would not leave the camp unless arrayed in uniform and gold lace.18 Thomas Mundy pointed out the diversity of the digging community, as fine a class of men as anyone could wish to see; many of them well educated, doctors, lawyers, merchants sons; in fact all trades and professions. The problem was that the rag-tag police were continually taunting the diggers with their mule like subjugation. The insult stung. These were men of pluck and spirit and intolerant of injustice, wrote Mundy, indignant at the impervious and corrupt administration of the law.
Different nationalities saw the problem of governance from a different point of view, but the landscape was the same. The Irish knew all about the cant of British justice; the atavistic pulse of harassment and discrimination at the hands of the British throbbed in their veins. To Raffaello Carboni, it was the hated Austrian rule, which was now attempted, in defiance of God and man, to be transplanted into this colony. American George Francis Train had no argument with the licence fee; he thought it a perfectly reasonable trade for wood, water, a gold escort, police protection and the privilege of driving a spade into the earth. What Train deplored was the Legislative Council, an institution he called a burlesque on free representation. It was absurd that the miners had no representation. Citizen George, who would later run for the US presidency as an independent, could patently see there is a strong Australian feeling growing up, rooted in the principle that taxation without representation is tyranny.
It was never a long-term option to bully those who had themselves been at the top of the literate, entitled, bullying professions at home. Penury was shame enough. Being antagonised by stroppy British boy scouts was salt in the wounds.
Towards the end of June, Ellen Young’s beacon of hope appeared on the horizon. Sailing on the Queen of the South, Sir Charles Hotham and Lady Jane Sarah Hotham arrived in Victoria on 21 June 1854. Their advent was greeted with rapturous relief. The colony had been in a state of leadership limbo for eighteen months since Governor La Trobe’s resignation on the last day of 1852. More than that, a black cloud shrouded his departure, which did not eventuate until May 1854. While La Trobe waited for his replacement, his beloved Swiss wife, Sophie, died in her home town of Neufchatel. She had left prior to La Trobe with their two daughters, anticipating his speedy return. La Trobe was brokenhearted, and though his body remained in Victoria through to the autumn of ’54, his heart and soul were long gone.
William Kelly witnessed La Trobe’s physical departure. I saw the man in deep mourning, wrote Kelly, attended by a small cortege of attached friends, endeavouring to hide his sadness and dejection as he returned the parting salutes of those who at least esteemed him as a man if they could not extol him as a viceroy. Whatever La Trobe’s achievements—he had seen Victoria progress from a political satellite of Sydney to a prosperous gold-driven self-governing colony—all hint of success had been subsumed in a general public reproach for his perceived economic mismanagement and political ineptitude. On 28 June the GEELONG ADVERTISER reported on the quiet departure of La Trobe: the lonely, bereaved man…the yells and hootings of his savage persecutors salute him as he goes. It would be cold comfort to learn that, unlike his successor, La Trobe at least got away with his life.
Victoria Welcomes Victoria’s Choice read the banner strung across Princes Bridge for the grand procession to lead Governor Hotham and his lady from Sandridge Pier to Flagstaff Gardens. Sir Charles proceeded on horseback. Lady Hotham and Mrs Kaye, wife of the new colonial secretary who had arrived on the same ship, followed in a carriage and four. They were greeted by the flags of all nations and sects, miles of bunting, brass bands and wild cheers for the official welcome parade through the streets of Melbourne. An installation ceremony was held at the government offices. Hotham swore his oaths before the Bishop of Melbourne, Church of England clergy, the Rabbi of the Melbourne congregation and the heads of other denominations. A proclamation was read. The Union Jack was hoisted. Artillery fire sounded from Flagstaff Hill. Hotham made an impromptu speech to the rejoicing crowd, promising to do his duty as an honest, straightforward man should do.19 Such frank, liberal speeches, as Charles Evans noted, won Hotham the goodwill of the people.
The press were sympathetic towards the herculean task ahead. The GEELONG ADVERTISER recognised that Hotham had to bring to heel a whole army of lazy and incompetent hangers-on, indolent, careless, incorrigible; men given jobs on the goldfields simply because they could not be kept sober in town. There was also the matter of the massive public debt accrued by La Trobe’s administration. Hotham was a slightly built man, with a long nose and mutton chops stretching down his thin face, but he wore his burden gallantly. Born into nobility, the eldest son in a family of eleven children, with a distinguished naval and diplomatic career behind him, Hotham had been expecting to command a ship in the Crimea. He took his gubernatorial appointment to Victoria as an unwarranted slap. Imperial duty alone fuelled his passage.
But there was some cause for exuberance, for Sir Charles Hotham, at forty-eight years of age, had recently married for the first time. As for so many other gold rush immigrants, the Hothams’ voyage would be their honeymoon. And Sir Charles’s new wife was a formidable consolation prize. Jane Sarah Hood was the daughter of Samuel Hood, the 2nd Baron Bridport and a Tory MP, and Charlotte Nelson, Duchesa di Bronte, niece of Horatio Nelson. The third of seven children, Jane moved between court commitments at Windsor and her family’s lands in Somerset. Petite, beautiful and accomplished, she had married for the first time in 1838. Her husband, Hugh Holbech, died eleven years later; they had no children.20 On 10 December 1853, aged thirty-six, and four years a widow, she married Sir Charles Hotham, who had been appointed lieutenant governor of Victoria just four days earlier.
She knew what she was signing up for. Lady Hotham’s new life would take her far away from Somerset garden parties and court appearances routinely noted in THE TIMES. In April, the Hothams sailed for Victoria, accompanied by three servants, Mr and Mrs Kaye and a cargo of furniture to fit out the newly acquired Government House at Toorak. The ARGUS reported that when the new first lady of Victoria arrived at the dock, her sweet face was illuminated by a huge smile of genuine excitement. She has a very amiable countenance, sketched the ARGUS journalist, her complexion is fair, with light, soft blue eyes…unaffected in her manner and very prepossessing. The journalist was impressed that, at Hotham’s induction ceremony, Lady Hotham showed evident satisfaction in so cordial a reception, her pleasure beamed in every glance. She showed plainly that she enjoyed the whole affair and went through a rather protracted ceremony with nerve, cheerfulness and unmistakable gratification.21
You’ve got to admire the buoyancy of the people too. All their great expectations smashed to smithereens, and now reassembled by faith in a viceregal second coming: a human mosaic of optimism, with child-like trust as the glue. The people of Melbourne are looking for the arrival of Sir Charles Hotham as religious enthusiasts might look forward to the millennium, wrote the editor of the GEELONG ADVERTISER on 8 June. The Messiah. Father Christmas. Any old patriarch would do. But the editor was guarded in his praise. It would not be wise for Hotham to remain on the poop; he must acquaint himself with the poor devils of the third class and the sooner he went tween decks the better. George Francis Train was similarly cautious. I hope [Hotham] is equal to the times in which he lives, wrote Train in his weekly despatch to the BOSTON GLOBE on 23 July, for if he is not, depend upon it his official reign will be painfully brief, for our people have begun to think. Train conjured a sticky prophecy: Our politics are in their infancy, but their manhood will be reached ere they touch their youth. They’ll burst out in all their glory when it will be least suspected. Which sounds, at the very least, messy.
But in those early days of Hotham’s period in office, more people shared Ellen Young’s confidence than Train’s doubts. Hotham was expected to be all things to all people. Shopkeepers thought their trade would increase. Landowners thought the value of their property would rise. Diggers thought their licence fees would be reduced and their grievances sympathetically heard. He is certain to arrive with inflated notions of his importance and ability, warned the GEELONG ADVERTISER, but the people wanted to believe in this new new beginning, this fresh fresh start. It seemed a good sign when Hotham began reducing the wages of public servants and sacking others outright. The icing on the cake of such fiscal discipline was Lady Hotham’s decision to cultivate her own garden at Toorak, reducing the need for groundsmen. She would be a gratuitous labourer, the DIGGERS’ ADVOCATE reported with satisfaction.
The decision to house the new governor in the lofty hills of Toorak (La Trobe had lived in a modest home by the river in Richmond) and to undertake an expensive renovation and furnishing of the home, rented from a prosperous merchant, was not without controversy. La Trobe had been hounded for the stupendous amount of public debt he had accumulated, despite his own personal frugality. And these were anti-aristocratic times. The Hothams would soon encounter the perverse collective psychology of their new home town. ‘Downstairs’ thought it right that everyone should live as one. As Martha Clendinning had realised to the benefit of her business, it was politic to dress down. Yet those who had managed to climb to higher social ground were affronted to find muslin where they expected silk. When the Hothams threw a viceregal ball, the press had a field day with the penny-pinching in the drinks department. Hotham served colonial beer instead of champagne and was forever after known as the Small Beer Governor. When one of the guests later got sick, supposedly from the toxic alcohol, and Hotham sacked the public servant who ordered the beer, there was an uproar. What a despot! The fine line between viceregal authority and populism was proving difficult to identify.
So when Sir Charles announced that he and his wife would leave the comfortable confines of their Toorak mansion to visit the goldfields and personally take the temperature of the restive people, the news was taken as a sure sign that restitution was imminent. Ellen wrote another poem, the first of her offerings to be published in the BALLARAT TIMES. Henry Seekamp also had ten copies of the poem printed on a pale pink silk, one of which Ellen later pasted into the front of her poetry volume. The title: Visit of Sir Charles Hotham, K.C.B., Lieut. Gov. of Victoria, To Ballarat. The by-line: by Ellen F. Young, the Ballarat Poetess. The gist:
The man of upright heart and daring deed,
Comes to relieve us in our urgent need…
Our future guide to happiness and peace,
To us securing all true wealth’s increase.
Ever mindful of purist Chartism’s aims—companionate marriage, equality of purpose and valour between the sexes—Ellen also includes Lady Jane Hotham in her salutation.
For the great good Victoria will gain—
Let us all honor on Sir Hotham rain,
And let his fair, accomplish’d, gentle bride,
Her equal due, —share in his fame, world-wide.
To her we’ll give an equal meed of praise
(As one Heav’n-sent, our moral worth to raise)…
And soon may Ballarat, Victoria’s pride,
Be honor’d with Sir Hotham and his bride.
Despite Ellen’s tribute, Sir Charles’s bride has been anything but honoured with an equal measure of history’s attention. Whole biographies have been written about Governor Hotham, but there is not one extant image of Lady Hotham to place beside the official portraits of His Excellency. No photos, paintings or sketches exist. Lady Hotham did keep a diary of her time in Victoria, but only snippets survive. However, there is enough information in other fragmentary sources to know that Lady Jane Hotham was no puffed-up princess.
Of the two Hothams, it was ‘her ladyship’ who proved more adaptable to the new circumstances. Journalists noted that she was gracious and open, perpetually cheerful and appeared to greet every new situation with wide-eyed enthusiasm. She intuited the need to shed aristocratic pretension when mixing with the hoi polloi, but to stroke the plumes of the nouveau riche who flocked to Toorak in their finery. She threw dinner parties every week, and invited both all the best people in the colony, as William Kelly described the squattocracy, as well as those who, before striking gold, never trod on a carpeted floor. Such stalwart dames and strapping girls wore low evening costume for morning engagements, but were always accepted graciously by the lady of the house. When Mrs Massey attended her first ball at Toorak—which she describes as a large handsome place, which the winding Yarra almost surrounds by her silver girdle—there were so many guests it took two hours to get the carriages up the drive to the front entrance. Lady Hotham’s affability was often contrasted to the unbending nature of her husband.
She also took to the streets. Before leaving for their tour of the diggings, Sir Charles and Lady Hotham attended a tradesman’s ball at the Criterion Hotel. There, described Kelly, they met an assemblage of hard-brushed, shiny-haired operatives, publicans, corporations and small shopkeepers, with their wives and daughters, girthed in silk or satin, and moist with mock eau-de-cologne. It was a tough crowd: common, aspirational, monied, star struck. Lady Hotham, with the consummate tact of her sex, merrily drank a low-rent brandy cocktail at the urging of one of the guests. Charles bristled. Lady Hotham was the belle of the ball.
Lady Hotham took her tact, her joie de vivre, her kindly yin to Charles’s dour yang—whatever it was she possessed that her husband didn’t—all the way to the diggings. Their goldfields tour took them to Bendigo, Ballarat and Castlemaine, bumping along in a Yankee Telegraph carriage, a grotesque article, according to William Westgarth, built for strength not comfort. First stop: Ballarat. They arrived at 5pm on Saturday 26 August, Sir Charles on horseback, her ladyship in the carriage. It had been raining steadily all afternoon. Their appearance elicited little fanfare. In fact, they saw the advantage in entering the stage unannounced and unrecognised, the better to take in an undoctored scene. The couple slipped quietly into the Government Camp, where they were staying in Police Inspector Robert Evans’ quarters (into which we managed to convey almost every piece of furniture to be found in the Camp, griped Police Magistrate D’Ewes). On Sunday they walked together through the diggings, stopping to ask questions of the diggers.
In a despatch to Lord Grey in London, Hotham later wrote that for some time I was enabled to walk undiscovered amongst them, and thus I gathered their real feeling towards the Government, and obtained an insight into some minor causes on which they desired redress. He concluded that the digging population was generally orderly, loyal and having among them a large proportion of women and children…there was an appearance of tranquillity and confidence. He concluded that it was through the influence of women that this restless population must be restrained. Hotham predicted that where a militia would fail to tame the more restive diggers, the wives would succeed. I would rather see an army of ten thousand women arrive, than an equal number of soldiers, he ended his despatch.22
On Monday, Lady Hotham went without her husband to Black Hill to view the mining operations there. She made a distinct impression. All were pleased with the governor, the GEELONG ADVERTISER later reported, but Lady Hotham ranks still higher. The diggers considered her a perfect darling and no more frightened of the mud than ourselves. It was considered a stroke of policy genius to conduct a private tour, an unobtrusive, inconspicuous visit rather than the tinsel, formality and studied effect of a public tour, which the diggers would have despised. Was this judicious decision made by Lady Hotham? She certainly seemed to enjoy the unorthodox viceregal outing. It was indeed a grand and gratifying sight, wrote the DIGGERS’ ADVOCATE, to see her Ladyship shaking hands and exchanging civilities with the clay-besmeared but generous-hearted diggers…scattering to the winds the almost blinding cloud of aristocratic prejudice. A miner wrote to the BALLARAT TIMES to express the same appreciation of Lady Hotham’s egalitarian inclinations. C.G.D. (Constantly Growling Digger) expected the Hothams to come up here as aristocratic novelties to have a look at us cattle [and] shrug their shoulders in horror. But he was delighted to observe her ladyship breaking and examining bits of clay in her white, delicate little hand and talking and smiling to the people about her all the while…why, bless your soul, she hasn’t half the airs and graces of your innkeeper’s or storekeeper’s wives.23 That was the diggings: the common slags getting all uppity, while the governor’s wife got down in the dirt.
It is thanks to the no-longer-growling digger that we have the best eyewitness pen portrait of the governor’s wife available:
There is Lady Hotham on his arm, her shoes and stockings all over mud, she doesn’t care a straw—she is joyous, and evidently happy. She is a tall young woman of six and twenty [actually she was thirty and seven]24 fine symmetrical figure, very active, no mock delicacy about her, blond complexion, fine liquid ox-eyes, fair hair, teeth white and regular, as a greyhound’s, and affable and conciliating manner—none of all that hauteur in her manner you might expect in her high position—cheerfulness and goodness are impressed upon her countenance. But dear me, how plain she dresses; plaid dress, red stripe, very plain bonnet…A gold watch, suspended by a massive gold chain, and hanging carelessly from her neck is the only ornament she wears.
The passage is descriptive, but sounds a cautionary note. All those women whose behaviour and attitude in the colonies has become uncomfortably defiant, ambitious or demanding, beware.
Now, if all the diggers, storekeepers and publicans wives would throw by their silks and satins, and appear like Lady Hotham, simplex in munditiis, they would confer a great boon upon their indulgent husbands; and be more respected, the closer they would follow Lady Hotham’s example.25
Less pressure to perform, more yielding to the simplicity of their surroundings—that’s what the miners of Ballarat wanted from their wives.
But Lady Hotham was not merely a walking mannequin of feminine decency. When the people threw up a hearty three cheers for Hotham and his lady, Jane turned around to face the crowd, her eyes beaming with delight and face suffused with gladness. She smiled, not with the cold dignity of a high born dame but with holiday glee. She said plainly, ‘Well, I declare, these diggers are, after all, fine hearty fellows; I’ll speak to Charles to be kind to the poor fellows, when we get back to town again’.
There is a more celebrated image of Lady Hotham at the Ballarat diggings: the moment when she was swept up in the arms of a hefty digger, who transported her safely over a muddy ditch. Either Lady Hotham was an independent spirit by nature, or her adaptable nature adjusted readily to the sense of freedom from convention that many women experienced on the diggings.
There’s a moment in Bendigo on their goldfields tour when we see the Hothams in an arresting snapshot of marital dissonance. In Bendigo Hotham was invited to a public dinner at the Criterion Hotel. Earlier that day, in front of a crowd of nine thousand, he promised to throw open the lands, and encouraged the people to pursue agricultural activities and make beautiful homes for themselves on the rich lands of the colony. He was presented with a petition to abolish the licence tax. He could not promise, he said, to do away with so large a portion of public revenue. All must pay for liberty and freedom in some shape or another, he consoled. To show his man-of-the-people stripes, he confided that he paid ten per cent tax on his property in England—and I can assure you, I dislike it most infernally, but I still must pay it. He agreed to give the subject his full attention but warned, having made up my mind as to what is right, I am just the boy to stick to it.
At the dinner that night, the boy prophesied that although Victoria was in its infancy, it would soon reach its manhood and live happily into old age. Though no individual would be threatened, Hotham was certain that the introduction of machinery to the goldfields would be an essential part of its rigorous manhood.
Now it was time to get on with the toasts. The chairman proposed a toast to Lady Hotham, who was present. Perhaps she wanted to answer the toast herself, to use the voice that Ballarat’s diggers had found so refreshing and open. But Sir Charles rose and spoke for her.
As you know, it is not in the power of a lady to take part in politics, and it is certainly not my wish that Lady Hotham should do so. In her name, I thank you for the toast that has been given. It is her part, and I believe I may add, her study, to take part in all those charities, and other works of a social character, which women are best suited for. (Cheers) If she adhere to this part of her duty, she can be as useful in that way to the people of this country, as I, with God’s blessing, can be in mine. (Great cheering.)26
What an odd speech. Who is it really for? The audience who met his uncontroversial ideas about women’s place with applause? Or Lady Hotham, who must have sat in silence, as she absorbed the subtle sting of rebuke from her husband of just nine months? It is possible that Hotham’s backhander was intended partly for Ellen Young, whose overtly political incursions may well have been brought to his attention in Ballarat. But later events cast it in the most personal light.
Fifty years after the Hothams’ goldfields tour, an old Ballarat pioneer added a piece to the Jane Hotham jigsaw. One day in the winter of ’54, the digger recalled in a letter to the Ballarat Council on 3 December 1904, he had sheltered a fugitive from a licence hunt, hiding the man in his tent. The next day the digger encountered a gentleman and his wife, asking directions to Bath’s Hotel. He walked them to their destination, and was surprised to find them asking him many questions about the conditions on the goldfields. Happy for an audience, he denounced the impudence and cruelty of the authorities, giving the events of the previous day as example. The gentleman halted, stood in front of the digger and said I am surprised Sir, that you, an Englishman, should give sanctuary to a rebel against your Queen. Do you know who I am? Yes, the governor. The digger protested: I simply did my duty as an Englishman should do to try and free a fellow man from oppression. An animated discussion then ensued, in which fifteen minutes was spent arguing the point of justification for my action, in which her Ladyship very energetically joined. Sir Charles retorted that he would not stand for insubordination—whether from the digger or his wife is unclear.27
Of course, the pugnacious digger could have been gilding the historical lily, half a century on—showcasing his courage in taking on the new governor. But then why bring Lady Hotham into the reminiscence of what he described as a triangular debate? Why draw a woman into the ring? Lady Hotham’s actions that day must have made a lasting impression on him, either from the sheer force of her energy or the unorthodox nature of her involvement in the discussion. Was her ladyship always so lippy, or was there something in the colonial air that made her feel suddenly reckless? It may have been this indiscretion, this challenge to his authority, that led Hotham to rein his wife in publicly at the Bendigo dinner. How could the governor rule with an iron fist if he could not control his lady? The governor certainly would not look like the sort of boy who stuck to his guns if even his outspoken young wife was prepared to take him on.
After the goldfields tour, the Hothams returned to Toorak, where Lady Hotham tended her unchaperoned garden and sold off all the gaudy, glittering ottomans and easy chairs that came with the house, while Sir Charles got on with the business of firing public servants and answering his mail.
In one of the frank, liberal speeches Hotham delivered on arrival, he encouraged the people to contact him directly should they wish to discuss a problem. Whenever a suggestion can be made or a hint given, he said magnanimously, let the author come to me, and he will always find me ready to attend to his wants. At all events he will find in me a friend who is willing to give a patient and attentive hearing.28
Be careful what you wish for. Raising and signing petitions had long been a way for individuals and groups to register protest and call attention to their causes. These days, we sign mass petitions on the internet or at stalls outside shopping centres with no real belief that we will have an effect. It is a gesture, a way of registering support for a cause, rather than a conscious act of participatory democracy. But in the nineteenth century petitions were a direct link between people and their leaders; the word ‘petitioner’ was, in some real sense, a synonym for ‘citizen’. Petitioning also performed an adhesive function, rallying support for local issues that gave people a sense of belonging to a moral, political or geographic community. (Internet petitions do have the effect of rallying what Benedict Anderson famously called ‘imagined communities’.)
In the early to mid-nineteenth-century, it was not uncommon for women to act as organisers for mass petitions in their towns, villages or neighbourhoods, although these petitions were customarily signed by men only. The British Anti-Corn Law League made masterful use of middle-class women to mobilise public opinion in its 1840s campaigns against government economic policy. The TIMES sneered at such women as the petticoat politicians of Manchester.29 Individual women also produced their own petitions supporting the rights of their husbands, dependents, local freedom fighters, victims of persecution or others for whom they pleaded for amnesty or mercy.
There are also several celebrated petitions, signed by thousands of women, to represent the interests of women as a group against a perceived social evil. Examples include the Women’s Petition Against Coffee Representing to Publick Consideration the Grand Inconveniencies accruing to their Sex from the Excessive Use of that Drying Enfeebling Liquor (1674)30 and the Women’s Petition to the National Assembly, presented in Versailles in 1789 by the women of France, demanding an equality of rights for all individuals, including the sweetest and most interesting half among you. Some historians claim that women’s petitioning efforts in Britain contributed substantively to parliament’s decision to end slavery.
It should come as no surprise, then, to find women involved in the petitioning activity that was one of the dominant forms for non-representative democracy on the early goldfields. Five thousand diggers, including two hardy women, Florence Foley and Sarah Williamson, signed the Bendigo Goldfields Petition, presented to Governor La Trobe in August 1853 in protest over the licence fee. At least one of the major petitions written by Ballarat miners pertaining to the licence fee or judicial proceedings in the final months of 1854 contains women’s names. With their husbands down a shaft, diggers’ wives probably did much of the footwork to collect signatures.
But goldfields women found other ways of making their presence felt at Toorak. Many eagerly accepted Hotham’s kind offer to be a friend when in need. Their individual petitions are peppered through the dusty piles of inward correspondence to the Colonial Office, tied with ragged string, secure in the vaults of the Public Record Office of Victoria.
The brittle blue pages make compulsive reading. In them we find women who were otherwise voiceless and undistinguished sending out distress signals that can still be heard today. Mary Sullivan of Bendigo began her campaign for compassion in May 1853, and was still fighting it with serial petitions up to January 1855. Mary’s husband had been sentenced to five years hard labour for stealing in a tent £5. She begged for remittance of the sentence, as she and her eighteen-month-old child were entirely without the means of living in an honest manner. In one of her petitions, Mary explained that her husband was only a few weeks in bad Company and promised to use all of my influence to lead him to the path of honesty. She hinted at her fate should her husband not be restored to her: I am Young and in a Town abounding in Vice, already I have been insulted. Mary was finally told that not enough of her husband’s sentence had been served; she should try again in October 1855.31 That Mary did not furnish this final petition suggests a poor outcome for her efforts to remain respectable.
Ann Middleton of Buninyong petitioned the governor on behalf of her husband, Charles, a butcher by trade, who had been convicted of sheep stealing and sentenced to five years hard labour on the roads. Ann pleaded for the welfare of her five children, aged between eight years and two weeks. She maintained that this was a first offence, and in any case Charles was not guilty; his partner claimed to have purchased the sheep and her husband paid half the purchase price. Please, begged Ann, restore him to his distressed and unhappy wife and by doing so enable him to provide the necessities of his now distressed family. Some forty signatures were attached to the petition, plus testimonials from former employees. Hotham scrawled his reply on the bottom corner of the petition. Cannot interfere with the course of the law. The law, as administered by the local judiciary, was so clearly regarded as an ass that such dismissive responses could only have fuelled the tension that was mounting in the second half of 1854.32
There are multiple petitions written by women—or, if a woman could only sign with her mark, by a literate friend—seeking to commute their husbands’ gaol sentences or have them freed from lunatic asylums. Some petitions are written in French and Italian. Mrs Grant collected 117 signatures in her petition to remit the gaol sentence of her husband, James Grant, who was nicked for shewing another person’s licence. Mrs Grant’s appeal was poignant.
Your Petitioner is at the present time in abject poverty and not able to procure the means of livelihood having just been confined, she wrote. Your Petitioner has also other children who are looking to her for the means of subsistence and what will become of herself and them during her husband’s imprisonment Petitioner knoweth not.
These heartfelt pleas fell on deaf ears, terminating with Governor Hotham’s standard and abrupt response: Cannot entertain. Not granted. Put away. To Mrs Grant’s appeal, the governor appended an extra chastisement: Never interfere with sentences. Culprit knew the law and risked being found out.33
Hotham tossed formal petitions bearing hundreds of signatures in the same bin as the many barely decipherable notes, which he marked begging letters, received from impoverished widows in search of pecuniary aid or frantic wives seeking work for their unemployed husbands. These women’s letters, along with their formal petitions, are immensely significant. Historian R. D. Walshe has claimed that the Eureka clash was inevitable due to Hotham’s ‘absolute intransigence’ in his mission to revamp the colony’s economy no matter the consequences.
Hotham’s resulting policy—of small government, smaller heart—was put under intense pressure by the constant barrage of earnest missives from desperate and deserving women. Some women even travelled down from the goldfields to seek a personal audience with the governor. Honoria Anna Bayley came from Ballarat to request employment for her husband. I trust that as one of her Majesty’s subjects you will not consider my request an intrusion, she wrote to Hotham.34 Others cast aside the usual petitioners’ attitude of fawning humility and came out all guns blazing. Eliza Dixon wrote to Hotham on behalf of her husband, who was awaiting his death sentence in jail. Should the sentence be carried into effect, she pleaded, you will leave a Wife and Mother of 4 children utterly destitute neither of them being able to support themselves one being at the breast and the rest all under 5 years of age. Eliza attributed personal responsibility to Hotham for this potential outcome, and she was remarkably forthright in her solution: Your Excellency’s mercy is a great attribute. Extend it to a poor unfortunate man who now cannot help himself and the Great Judge (should you ever require it) will do the same by you.35 Eliza’s letter was put away with all the others, and we can only guess what she thought when Hotham met his maker just over a year later.
Suspicious of what their governor’s friendship meant, people formed a new strategy. Lady Hotham began receiving her own cache of begging letters. Mrs O’Neill, supporting herself and her three children by needle work and selling mostly everything I had, requested assistance in finding a position for her two boys. Hoping your Ladyship will not think me too impolite, she wrote, perhaps you would have the goodness to speak to Sir Charles Hotham.36 Twenty-three-year-old Esther McKenzie petitioned Lady Hotham the same week. Owing to her husband being indisposed and her sixteen-month-old baby dangerously ill by Dentition and Colonial Fever and is not expected to live, she was very distressed and without the necessities of life. Money for rent, medicine, medical attendance and even the very sixpence with which I post this petition was borrowed. Lady Hotham had developed a reputation for benevolence; her largesse seemed to exist in inverse proportion to her husband’s. Esther was fully convinced of your Ladyship’s kindness to the distressed, and wrote that she is filled with hopes…in bestowing her a trifle to purchase some bread for her disabled family. Lady Hotham was not without pity. She instructed her clerk to acknowledge receipt of Esther’s petition, and ask her to forward testimonials from respectable persons who are acquainted with you. There is no further notation on the file. We can assume it too was put away. By coincidence, Lady Hotham did send £5 to another Mrs O’Neil in October 1854, after receiving her plea for assistance. Gold Commissioner Wright had appended a note to Mrs O’Neil’s letter explaining that her husband was a lieutenant in the 4th Regiment before he became ill and died. Mrs O’Neil argued that her husband’s military service entitled her to a grant of land in the colony, but £5 was all she got.37
What did men think of women’s petitioning efforts? Did they put their wives up to it, thinking that women’s appeals would fire a more penetrating arrow into the steely breast of the administration?
It seems not. The women’s letters were neither a ruse nor a joint strategy. The GEELONG ADVERTISER reported on the exacerbated humiliation of imprisoned diggers, knowing their wives were peddling for their release. When one man was inhumanely punished for his poverty with a gaol term for being unlicensed, the paper editorialised that what was worse than the injustice was the indignity.
These men in gold and silver lace, armed from head to heel, have taken the aged and sick from their tents. The spectacle is presented to us of a wife taking round, for signature, a petition for the release of her husband from gaol, by reason of his poverty and ill health.38
A spectacle. A debacle. A disgrace.
Can the writing of begging letters and petitions by women be considered a form of political activism? Clearly, they contribute to no formal political agenda or structural goal. They do not constitute part of an organised push for reform; there is no association or lobby group. No League of Extraordinary Gentlewomen. But when they are read as a block—and there are countless numbers of these petitions and begging letters—there’s no doubt that the ill-spelled, scribbled tales of deprivation, suffering and despair represented a significant rebuke to Hotham’s administration, and particularly to the moral legitimacy of his rule.
This wasn’t mob violence. There were no barricades or stone-throwing; no burning of effigies. But the message was the same. By constitutional means, these humble petitioners contributed to the growing murmur of public opprobrium inspired by Hotham’s obstinate refusal to listen to the people’s grievances. Unlike La Trobe, he openly promised to give a patient and attentive hearing to the hungry, homeless people. Instead, the men and women of Ballarat found their life-or-death pleas hastily put away.